A FATHER’S RIGHTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 June 1921, Page 5

A FATHER’S RIGHTS.

INJURY TO HIS CHILD. HAS HE THE RIGHT TO CLAIM DAMAGES? The subject of a father’s rights, within the law, was traversed by His Honor Sir John Salmond, in the Supreme Court at Wellington on Tuesday. The case was one in which the father and daughter severally sued the Education Board and the Wellington Technical Board, for £1552 damages, in respect of nijuries alleged to have been sustained by the girl, through the collapse of a form on which she was sitting, while a member of a shorthand class in the technical school at Northland. This was a dou'ble-barrelled action, said His Honor. The girl was suing the two boards for £lOOO for damages, in connection with the accident which she said happened to her in the class. The father, on the other hand, was claiming £552, in respect of expenditure he laid, he said,, incurred in securing medical treatment and massqge for her, as well ad other moneys expended as a result of her disability. His Honor remarked that the question of the father’s expenditure was too indefinite to be submitted to a jury, on the matter of a claim for damages. If damages were to be awarded, no estimate should be taken into account of damages to the father; the girl was the only one to be considered. “A father has no right to sue for damages for injury to his daughter, any more than a stranger has, but, in an indirect way, parents have 'been enabled to bring actions of this sort. He estimates ‘his claim for damages on the value of the domestic service he has

lost, through the girl’s injuries. The father has resumed, as the master of servants has done for centuries, that he is, as well as being the father of the child, also its master. Fathers, for centuries past, have regarded their children in the light of servants, in this connection. For instance, in an action taken bv the father against the seducer of his daughter, he has looked upon it that the services of his daughter have been taken from him by the seducer. So, in this case, the father sues for the loss he has incurred through his daughter’s services being taken from the house.”