English tort law concerns the compensation for harm to people's rights to health and safety, a clean environment, property, their economic interests, or their reputations. A "tort" is a wrong in civil law, rather than criminal law, that usually requires a payment of money to make up for damage that is caused. Alongside contracts and unjust enrichment, tort law is usually seen as forming one of the three main pillars of the law of obligations.

In English law, torts like other civil cases are generally tried in front a judge without a jury.

Following Roman law, the English system has long been based on a closed system^{[clarification needed]} of nominate torts, such as trespass, battery and conversion. This is in contrast to continental legal systems, which have since adopted more open systems of tortious liability. There are various categories of tort, which lead back to the system of separate causes of action. The tort of negligence is however increasing in importance over other types of tort, providing a wide scope of protection, especially since Donoghue v Stevenson. For liability under negligence, a duty of care must be established owed to a group of persons to which the victim belongs, a nebulous concept into which many other categories are being pulled.

Liability for negligence arises when one person breaches a duty of care owed to another. The main elements of negligence are:

In some situations, defences will be available to negligence. Special rules, and considerable bodies of case law have developed around four further particular fields in negligence: for psychiatric injury, economic loss, for public bodies, and when concerning omissions and third parties.

The establishment of a duty of care is usually broken up into a three-step test. The first case to establish a general duty of care was Donoghue v Stevenson. Famously, Mrs Donoghue claimed compensation for illness after she consumed a ginger beer containing a decomposed snail in a public house in Paisley, Scotland. The bottle was opaque so neither Mrs Donoghue nor the shopkeeper could see a snail, and at the time she could not sue the shopkeeper for breach of contract or consumer rights. The House of Lords by a majority held that the manufacturer, Mr Stevenson, was liable in tort. Lord Atkin held liability was "based upon a general public sentiment of moral wrongdoing for which the offender must pay" and people "must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour." By contrast, Lord Macmillan suggested that the law should protect Mrs Donoghue by incremental analogy to previous cases. Nevertheless, Lord Atkin's speech was widely followed and was understood to contain three main points for establishing a duty of care. First, the concept of reasonable foreseeability of harm; second, the claimant and the defendant being in a relationship of proximity; third, and more loosely, it being fair, just and reasonable to impose liability on the defendant for his careless actions. This three-step scheme (also known as the tripartite or threefold test), however, did not crystallise until the case of Caparo Industries Plc v Dickman. A company called Caparo took over another company by buying up a majority of its shares. It did this because it obtained word from a company audit that the target was financially sound. The audit was prepared by a group of accountants (Dickman) and was intended for shareholders, not outsiders. Once Caparo owned the company it found that the finances were in fact pretty shoddy, and so it sued the accountants for being negligent in its audit preparation. The House of Lords found against Caparo and established the current threefold test. Although it was "reasonably foreseeable" that outsiders might learn of the carelessly prepared information, it was not the case that Caparo and Dickman were in a relationship of "proximity". This the court used as a term of art (note, this is different from the American use of the word) to say that it should not be the case that absolutely anyone who heard something said that was stupid and acted on it can sue. The court was reacting to its concern that to allow a claim here might open the floodgates of litigation. The third element, whether liability would be "fair, just and reasonable", was an extra hurdle added as a catch-all discretionary measure for the judiciary to block further claims.

Once a duty of care has been established, it must be shown that a duty has been breached. The question the courts ask is whether the behaviour exhibited by the defendant fell below the threshold of a "reasonable man" (the objective test). In some cases where the defendant was in a special profession, e.g. being a doctor, the court will ask what standard of care a "reasonable doctor" or the like might have done. Allowance is usually made for the defendants age and a lower standard of a "reasonable child of a certain age" is applied to children. On the other hand, no allowance is made for other personal circumstances, such as the fact that the defendant was inexperienced in the task he set out to perform. He is expected to perform this task as a reasonably skilled and competent person.

Causation is complex, and is usually discussed in two parts. Simple causation is a question of whether "but for" the action by the defendant harm would have resulted. There has been some deal of discussion over whether a contributory cause is enough, and a variety of supplementary tests have been developed (e.g. the material contribution to risk and material damage to damage tests), often to deal specifically with a particular area of liability (asbestos cases, for instance).