Cox v Ergo Versicherung AG [2014] UKSC 22 is a judicial decision of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom relating to the conflict of laws and the assessment of damages following a road traffic accident.

On 21 May 2004, Major Christopher Cox, an officer serving with the British Army in Germany, was riding his bicycle on the road when a car hit him, causing fatal injuries.

It was also common ground that under German law his widow had a direct right of action against the insurer for such loss as she would have been entitled to recover from the driver.

Major Cox died before the Rome II Regulation came into force, and so the case was determined under the Private International Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1995.

The issue in the present case is whether Mrs Cox is entitled to rely on the provisions of sections 3 and 4 of the Fatal Accidents Act 1976.

Accordingly, he cut across the procedural / substantive issue to use the English methods of quantifying the allowable German heads of loss.

He noted: "It is not at all satisfactory that such significant consequences should turn on difficult and technical considerations of the kind considered in the previous paragraph.

As a preliminary issue Lord Sumption had to consider whether "the Fatal Accidents Act 1976 should be applied notwithstanding the ordinary rules of private international law, for two reasons ... that as a matter of construction that Act had extraterritorial effect [or] ... that the principles enacted in Fatal Accidents Act represented "mandatory rules" of English law, applicable irrespective of ordinary rules of private international law.

"[8] He cited with approval the comments of Lord Scarman in Clark v Oceanic Contractors Inc [1983] 2 AC 130 at 145, that "unless the contrary is expressly enacted or so plainly implied that the courts must give effect to it, United Kingdom legislation is applicable only to British subjects or to foreigners who by coming to the United Kingdom, whether for a short or a long time, have made themselves subject to British jurisdiction".