The scope of vicarious liability has significantly expanded since its original conception. Today employers are being found liable for actions of employees that they did not authorise, and never would have authorised if asked. They are being held liable for an employee's criminal activity. In the related strict liability field of non-delegable duties, they are being held liable for wrongdoing of independent contractors. Notions of strict liability have grown increasingly isolated in the law of tort, given the exponential growth in the tort of negligence. They require intellectual justification. Such a justification has proven to be elusive and largely unsatisfactory in relation to vicarious liability and to concepts of non-delegable duty. The law of three jurisdictions studied has now apparently embraced the 'enterprise risk' theory to rationalise the imposition of vicarious liability. This book subjects this theory to strong critique by arguing that it has many weaknesses, which the courts should acknowledge. It suggests that a rationalisation of the liability of an employer for the actions of an employee lies in more traditional legal doctrine which would serve to narrow the circumstances in which an employer is legally liable for a wrong committed by an employee.

How often our actions go awry because our perceptions are at odds with reality! This book examines the legal issues that arise when we seek to avoid the untoward consequences of an action by claiming that our perception was flawed. We all make mistakes. Some have unfortunate consequences: we might overpay a debt or make an unfavourable contract, or we might be sued or accused of a crime as a result of our mistake.
Claims to alleviation on the grounds of mistake are likely to arise wherever the law prescribes a state of mind (some kind of intent) as a prerequisite for the application of a legal rule. This book asks when the fact that a person made a mistake should entitle them to alleviation. This may involve the intention to enter into a contract or a payment, in which case a person could seek its reversal, or it might involve the intent to commit a tort or crime, in which case they could seek forgiveness for the offence. Farnsworth defines 'alleviating' mistakes as those which entitle a person to relief from untoward consequences of their mistake.
There is no general 'law of mistake', and despite their similarities, few discussions of mistake in one setting pause to consider mistakes in other contexts. The goals of fields as disparate as contracts and criminal law are very different: how do these differences affect the treatment of mistakes? Farnsworth sets out a new taxonomy of mistakes. His analysis reveals that over the past century, there has been a remarkable increase in the receptivity of courts and scholars to claims for both reversal and forgiveness--a waxing of alleviating mistakes.

The Guidelines for the Assessment of General Damages are designed to provide a clear and logical framework for the assessment of damages in personal injury cases. The first edition of this title was regarded as a landmark in personal injury practice. Each succeeding issue has built on this reputation and the book has now firmly established itself as essential reading for all those involved in the area of personal injury litigation. This new edition has been updated to take into account inflation since the last edition and to reflect decisions of the higher courts on quantum. New guidance is provided in relation to the application of the tariff-based awards for general damages under the Civil Liability Act 2018. A new section is included dealing with sexual abuse as well as a new chapter dealing with work-related limb disorders. Efforts have also been made to identify those cases likely to fall within the new GBP5,000 small claims limit in certain RTA cases. This book is edited by a working party of the Judicial College, under the chairmanship of The Hon. Mrs Justice Lambert DBE. The members of the working party are all lawyers and personal injury specialists: Stuart McKechnie QC, barrister; Steven Snowden QC, barrister; Lisa Sullivan, Master of the Queen's Bench Division; and Richard Wilkinson, barrister.

Causation is a foundational concept in tort law: in claims for compensation, a claimant must demonstrate that the defendant was a cause of the injury suffered in order for compensation to be awarded. Proof of Causation in Tort Law provides a critical, comparative and theoretical analysis of the general proof rules of causation underlying the tort laws of England, Germany and France, as well as the exceptional departures from these rules which each system has made. Exploring the different approaches to uncertainty over causation in tort law, Sandy Steel defends the justifiability of some of these exceptions, and categorises and examines the kinds of exceptional rules suggested by the case law and literature. Critically engaged with both the theoretical literature and current legal doctrine, this book will be of interest to private law scholars, judges and legal practitioners.

Rights, Wrongs, and Injustices is the first comprehensive account of the scope, foundations, and structure of remedial law in common law jurisdictions. The rules governing the kinds of complaints that common law courts will accept are generally well understood. However, the rules governing when and how they respond to such complaints are not. This book provides that understanding. It argues that remedies are judicial rulings, and that remedial law is the law governing their availability and content. Focusing on rulings that resolve private law disputes (for example, damages, injunctions, and restitutionary orders), this book explains why remedial law is distinctive, how it relates to substantive law, and what its foundational principles are. The book advances four main arguments. First, the question of what courts should do when individuals seek their assistance (the focus of remedial law) is different from the question of how individuals should treat one another in their day-to-day lives (the focus of substantive law). Second, remedies provide distinctive reasons to perform the actions they command; in particular, they provide reasons different from those provided by either rules or sanctions. Third, remedial law has a complex relationship to substantive law. Some remedies are responses to rights-threats, others to wrongs, and yet others to injustices. Further, remedies respond to these events in different ways: while many remedies (merely) replicate substantive duties, others modify substantive duties and some create entirely new duties. Finally, remedial law is underpinned by general principles-principles that cut across the traditional distinctions between so-called "legal" and "equitable" remedies. Together, these arguments provide an understanding of remedial law that takes the concept of a remedy seriously, classifies remedies according to their grounds and content, illuminates the relationship between remedies and substantive law, and presents remedial law as a body of principles rather than a historical category.

This book looks at the negligence concept of tort law and studies the efficiency issue arising from the determination of negligence. It does so by scrutinizing actual court decisions from three common law jurisdictions - Britain, India and the United States of America. This volume fills a very significant gap, scrutinizing 52 landmark judgments from these three countries, by focussing on the negligent affliction of economic loss determined by common law courts and how these findings relate to the existing theoretical literature. By doing so, it examines the formalization of legal concepts in theory, primarily the question of negligence determination and liability, and their centrality in theories concerning tort law. This book will be very helpful for students, professors and practitioners of law, jurisprudence and legal theory. It will additionally be of use to researchers and academics interested in law and economics, procedure and legal history.

Tort law is a core element of every law degree in England and Wales. Unlocking Torts will ensure you grasp the main concepts with ease. This book explains in detailed, yet straightforward, terms: Negligence and negligence related torts including occupiers' liability and employers' liability; Land based torts such as trespass, nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher; Trespass to the person; Defamation and other torts relating to reputation; Economic torts, breach of a statutory duty, vicarious liability, defences and remedies. The fifth edition is fully up to date with key case law including the recent decision of Robinson v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2018] UKSC and Darnley v Croydon Health Services NHS Trust [2018] UKSC 50 amongst others. The Unlocking the Law series is designed specifically to make the law accessible. Each chapter opens with a list of aims and objectives and contains diagrams to aid learning. Cases and judgments are prominently displayed, as are primary source quotations. Summaries help check your understanding of each chapter, there is a glossary of legal terminology. New features include problem questions with guidance on answering, as well as essay questions and answer plans, plus cases and materials exercises. All titles in the series follow the same formula and include the same features so students can move easily from one subject to another. The series covers all the core subjects required by the Bar Council and the Law Society for entry onto professional qualifications as well as popular option units.

The volume focuses on litigation damages, economic and non-economic, including punitive damages; their definitions, calculations, and assignments in the US and EU. The objective is to examine areas of convergence and divergence in the academic and practical treatment of damages issues in the US and EU. Many of the chapters in the volume are drawn from the papers and discussions generated at the Transatlantic Dialogue meetings of the National Association of Forensic Economics that began in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2004. That meeting focused on the development of the 'Ogden' multipliers for calculating damages mandated for consideration by UK Courts in 1999. The 2005 meetings (Dublin, Ireland) centred on Markov methodologies used in the US for generating work-life tables and their adoption into damages multipliers, punitive damages, and the process of Irish tort reform. In 2006 discussions in Florence, Italy, focused on methods for calculating non-economic damages in the US and EU as well as the process of harmonization of tort law within the EU. Most recently, the 2007 discussions in Barcelona, Spain, dealt with comparisons of scheduled damages systems in the US and the EU.

This book undertakes an analysis of academic and judicial responses to the problem of evidential uncertainty in causation in negligence. It seeks to bring clarity to what has become a notoriously complex area by adopting a clear approach to the function of the doctrine of causation within a corrective justice-based account of negligence liability. It first explores basic causal models and issues of proof, including the role of statistical and epidemiological evidence, in order to isolate the problem of evidential uncertainty more precisely. Application of Richard Wright's NESS test to a range of English case law shows it to be more comprehensive than the 'but for' test that currently dominates, thereby reducing the need to resort to additional tests, such as the Wardlaw test of material contribution to harm, the scope and meaning of which are uncertain. The book builds on this foundation to explore the solution to a range of problems of evidential uncertainty, focusing on the Fairchild principle and the idea of risk as damage, as well as the notion of loss of a chance in medical negligence which is often seen as analogous with 'increase in risk', in an attempt to bring coherence to this area of the law.

Tort Law: A Modern Perspective is an advanced yet accessible introduction to tort law for lawyers, law students, and others. Reflecting the way tort law is taught today, it explains the cases and legal doctrines commonly found in casebooks using modern ideas about public policy, economics, and philosophy. With an emphasis on policy rationales, Tort Law encourages readers to think critically about the justifications for legal doctrines. Although the topic of torts is specific, the conceptual approach should pay dividends to those who are interested broadly in regulatory policy and the role of law. Incorporating three decades of advancements in tort scholarship, Tort Law is the textbook for modern torts classrooms.

Tort law, a fundamental building block of every legal system, features prominently in mass culture and political debates. As this pioneering anthology reveals, tort law is not simply a collection of legal rules and procedures, but a set of cultural responses to the broader problems of risk, injury, assignment of responsibility, compensation, valuation, and obligation.
Examining tort law as a cultural phenomenon and a form of cultural practice, this work makes explicit comparisons of tort law across space and time, looking at the United States, Europe, and Asia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It draws on theories and methods from law, sociology, political science, and anthropology to offer a truly interdisciplinary, pathbreaking view. Ultimately, tort law, the authors show, nests within a larger web of relationships and shared discursive conventions that organize social life.

Brings together the legislation that students on Scottish LLB law of obligations courses need to know about Avizandum Legislation on the Scots Law of Obligations takes a unitary approach to this difficult and fragmented subject. It contains a wide-ranging selection of materials, including statutes, statutory instruments, EU Directives and Codes, relating to contract, delict and unjustified enrichment, together with provisions that affect the general law on civil liability. Key contents include: Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973 Sale of Goods Act 1979 Requirements of Writing (Scotland) Act 1995 Consumer Rights Act 2015 Unidroit Principles for International Commercial Contracts 2016

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ...wares in the name of Heaven, and the mob will hasten to deck him out in purple and fine linen When Dr Campbell" (meaning the plaintiff) " has finished his Chinese letters, he will be a greater simpleton than we take him for if he does not force ofi' another 100,000 copies of his paper by launching a fresh series of thunderbolts against the powers of darkness. In the meanwhile, -there can be no doubt that he is making a very good thing indeed of the spiritual wants of the Chinese." And the plaintiff, by reason of the premises, has been greatly injured, scandalized and aggrieved. And the plaintiff claims 1000. Plea: Not guilty. On the trial, before Cockburn, C.J., at the Sittings at Guildhall after Hilary Term, it appeared that the defendant was the Printer of a weekly newspaper or periodical called The Satu/rday Review 'if Politics, Literature, Science and Art, and that the libels complained of were published in an article headed "The Heathens' Best Friend," contained in the number for June 14th, 1862. The plaintiff was a minister of a dissenting congregation, and the editor and part proprietor of The British Ensign and The Bfitish Standard, which were dissenting newspapers or periodicals. Extracts from the former were put in evidence, containing a, proposal to publish in it a series of letters to the Queen and persons of note on the subject and duty of evangelizing the Chinese, and to promote as widely as possible the circulation of the numbers of the paper in which those letters should appear, in order to call the attention of missionaries and others to the importance of this work of evangelization. A series of letters accordingly appeared in The British Ensign, the three first of which, ...

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Many of the defining features of the modern law of tort can be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, but, until now, developments in that period have never received a dedicated historical examination. This book examines both common law and statutory innovations, paying special attention to underlying assumptions about the operation of society, the function of tort law, and the roles of those involved in legal changes. It recovers the legal and social contexts in which some landmark decisions were given (and which puts those decisions in a very different light) and draws attention to significant and suggestive cases that have fallen into neglect. It also explores the theoretical debates of the period about the nature of tort law, and reveals the fascinating patterns of influence and power at work behind statutory initiatives to reform the law.

In this book, articles by leading tort scholars from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States deal with important theoretical and practical issues that are emerging in the law of torts. The articles analyse recent leading developments in areas such as economic negligence, causation, vicarious liability, non-delegable duty, breach of statutory duty, intentional torts, damages, and tort law in the family. They provide a foretaste of the issues that will face tort law in the near future and offer critical viewpoints that should not go unheeded. With its rich breadth of contributors and topics, Emerging Issues in Tort Law will be highly useful to lawyers, judges and academics across the common law world. Contributors: Elizabeth Adjin-Tettey, Kumaralingam Amirthalingam, Peter Benson, Vaughan Black, Peter Cane, Erika Chamberlain, Israel Gilead, Paula Giliker, Rick Glofcheski, Lewis N Klar QC, Michael A Jones, Richard Lewis, John Murphy, Jason W Neyers, Ken Oliphant, David F Partlett, Stephen GA Pitel, Denise Reaume, Robert H Stevens, Andrew Tettenborn, Stephen Todd, Shauna van Praagh, Stephen Waddams, David R Wingfield, Richard W Wright.

Mass production and changes in distribution chains have severely restricted the power of the seller and the buyer to use their own skill and judgement. As a result, 'product liability' has developed into a distinct area of legal regulation. Traditional legal techniques, such as the warranty against latent defects in contract and fault in tort, proved inadequate safeguards. This examination of western-European legal systems combines legal history and comparative law to demonstrate how tort law has adapted to meet these new conditions.

Cases arising from disputes between neighbours (what English law would describe in terms of the law of nuisance) fall towards the edge of the law of tort, on its boundary with the law of property. They therefore provide a good example of how the categorisation of a case can affect the liability rule: tort law is typically concerned with fault, property law with strict liability. The aim of this book is to examine the importance of these category shifts, as well as the extent to which statutory interventions, planning control and the like have had an impact on the analysis of tortuous liability.

Rail and road accidents are examples of new sources of harm, particularly personal injury, which arose almost simultaneously across Western Europe. The area of rail accidents provides early examples of a move away from fault liability in certain countries, but not in others. Although statutory regulation and extra-statutory standards form part of the context of liability, private law actions for damages and the plasticity of fault ideas remain central to the law's response. Insurance determines the relative importance of private law actions. Traffic liability is a field in which different solutions have been developed by different legal systems. For example, while France developed strict liability in the 1920s and 1930s and no-fault liability in 1985, English law has remained wedded to fault. The stability of each legal solution suggests that the background insurance position has been settled in the different countries, albeit in differing ways.

This detailed description and comparative analysis of the development of tort law in Europe over the last 150 years is based on national reports that are structured by a basic questionnaire. The national reports are complemented with a comparative analysis of the parallel, though often diverging, developments in the different legal systems. It can clearly be seen that different groups in the legal systems, such as judges and scholars, often had diverging views on tort law that were translated into more specific doctrinal and evaluative statements. Accompanied by a general expansion of liability due to changing perceptions of the risks of accidents, the former Roman law of delict and the medieval law of torts have been transformed into modern rules of extra-contractual liability that are deeply entrenched into the social security and insurance systems.

Technological developments posed a challenge to the established law, especially tort law, at approximately the same time across Europe. This book focuses on the similarity and diversity of responses to such developments in different jurisdictions. Three examples have been studied in depth: the escape of sparks from steam engines in the middle of the nineteenth century; exploding boilers in the latter part of the nineteenth century; and asbestos-related industrial disease in the middle and late twentieth century. The book shows how the rules of tort law were used and adapted and demonstrates how other systems of regulation and compensation were introduced to prevent injuries or to provide compensation to victims outside tort law. The relatively marginal role of tort law in these areas reveals much about legal development in general.

The way the law responds to death or personal injury resulting from medical treatment has changed over time. Expectations of success in medical interventions have risen. Hospitals have become more complex and use more advanced technology. This has had an impact on the liability of medical practitioners, both in generating new problems and in raising standards of expected care. While the focus is civil liability, typically either through contract or tort, this volume of essays also examines compensation systems outside private law. This topic has grown in significance since 1945. The problems encountered by the law are similar across the different jurisdictions, even if the health service arrangements are different. The legal changes are also set against changes in the institutional background, such as the role of the state, the availability of insurance and the professionalisation of medical practitioners.

In the mid 1980s, there was a crisis in the availability, affordability, and adequacy of liability insurance in the United States and Canada. Mass tort claims such as the asbestos, DES, and Agent Orange litigation generated widespread public attention, and the tort system came to assume a heightened prominence in American life. While some scholars debate whether or not any such crisis still exists, there has been an increasing political, judicial and academic questioning of the goals and future of the tort system.
Exploring the Domain of Tort Law reviews the evidence on the efficacy of the tort system and its alternatives. By looking at empirical evidence in five major categories of accidents--automobile, medical malpractice, product-related accidents, environmental injuries, and workplace injuries--the authors evaluate the degree to which the tort system conforms to three normative goals: deterrence, corrective justice, and distributive justice. In each case, the authors review the deterrence and compensatory properties of the tort system, and then review parallel bodies of evidence on regulatory, penal, and compensatory alternatives.
Most of the academic literature on the tort system has traditionally been doctrinal or, in recent years, highly theoretical. Very little of this literature provides an in-depth consideration of how the system works, and whether or not there are any feasible alternatives. Exploring the Domain of TortLaw contributes valuable new evidence to the tort law reform debate. It will be of interest to academic lawyers and economists, policy analysts, policy professionals in government and research organizations, and all those affected by tort law reform.

The 'reasonable person' is used to assess the acceptability of behaviour in many areas of the law including criminal law and accident law. However the reasonable person has also attracted substantial criticism from egalitarian critics and feminists insofar as it presupposes contested notions of 'normal' behaviour and may discriminate against certain classes of defendant. Rethinking the Reasonable Person systematically investigates whether there are deeper foundations to these criticisms and discusses how the legal standard might be reconstructed in a more egalitarian way.

This book is based closely on the lectures delivered by Tony Weir in 1996 as part of the Clarendon Law lectures series sponsored by Oxford University Press. It is an exciting and provocative book which contains a number of controversial propositions, defended with vigour by its author. The three lectures reproduced here deal with liability in tort for intentionally inflicted economic loss. They are characterized by a very unusual combination of bold leading statements and multi-layered supporting analysis. There are also useful Appendices containing full case transcripts of recent, significant cases, including Millar v Bassey and de Voto v Pacific. This book will be irresistible to all scholars of the law of tort, and the author's reputation alone will ensure this book is well-received.