In this article an attempt is made to illustrate the civil liability of the design engineer. The point of departure will be to ascertain how civil liability is founded in our law. Jurisprudence currently recognises two fields of liability, namely contractual and/or delictual. In order to highlight this, several actual cases are studied and summarised. In the first case the relationship between the employer and the engineer was contractual. During construction the employer made several changes to the structure which resulted in the engineer warning the employer (verbally) that these changes would result in an unacceptable, but safe, standard, due to space constraints. The employer nevertheless persisted with the changes. The employer then, being unhappy with the structure, proceeded to take action against the engineer.
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