misfeance

doing something, essentially legal, wrongly, as opposed to not doing something at all that should have been done (which is called non-feasance). A species of the tort is misfeasance in public office. Traditionally this was the case of directed malice intended to injure a person – the exercise of public power for an ulterior motive . The House of Lords has recently given new life to the tort by holding that a public officer would be liable for the tort if he acted in the knowledge of or with reckless indifference to the illegality of his acts or with reckless indifference to the probability of causing injury to the particular plaintiff or a class of which the plaintiff was a member. This form of the tort depends upon the absence of an honest belief by the officer that his act was lawful: Three Rivers DC v . Governor and Company of the Bank of Scotland [2000] TLR 396.