Explain and define the concept of duty of care. Can it adequately distinguish situations which should give rise to liability from those which should not?

Lord Atkins in the case of Donoghue v. Stevenson  was the first to extract and apply a general duty of care in the tort of Negligence because this was a general duty of care, a duty that could exist without a pre-existing contractual relationship. Therefore, the common law since the initial landmark case of Donoghue has attempted to form a principle, in what would be too wide a general principle, that can distinguish between situations that do and those that do not give rise to a duty of care. It is doubtless that there are many cases there has been a development of a coherent principle that can adequately identify situations in which a duty of care has arisen….(short extract)