Provides an authoritative analytical and practical doctrinal consideration of the law relating to professional immunities in tort law. Dr Davies primarily focuses on English law with some coverage of other common law jurisdictions where cases and other materials are relevant. Professional obligations and liabilities play an important role in tort, with a limited number of professional and occupational groups considered to benefit from some 'immunity' from these. This essential text reviews the nature of immunities and considers the contexts in which the term is used before providing examples of those 'immune' professions with reference to case law and leading secondary commentary. It addresses the rationales and justifications for immunities and, more broadly, their interaction with general professional negligence and liability issues.

Author Marshall S. Shapo presents the argument that the body of law Americans have developed concerning responsibility for injuries and prevention of injuries has some of the qualities of a constitution--a fundamental set of principles that govern relations among people and between people and corporate and governmental institutions. This 'injury law constitution' includes tort law, legislative compensation systems like workers compensation, and the many statutes that regulate the safety of risky activities and of products ranging from drugs and medical devices to automobiles and cigarettes. An Injury Law Constitution presents a novel thesis that embraces leading features of the American law of injuries. Professor Shapo's analysis, into which he weaves the history of these varied systems of law, links them to the unique compensation plan devised for the victims of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. Professor Shapo examines how our injury law reflects deeply held views in American society on risk and injury, indicating how the injury law constitution serves as a guide to the question of what it means to be an American. Refusing to accept easy academic formulas, An Injury Law Constitution captures the reality of how people respond to injury risks in functional contexts involving diverse activities and products.

Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number and magnitude of punitive damages verdicts rendered by juries in civil trials. Probably the most extraordinary example is the July 2000 award of $144.8 billion in the Florida class action lawsuit brought against the cigarette manufacturers. More puzzling were two recent verdicts against the auto manufacturer BMW in Alabama. In identical cases, argued in the same court before the same judge, one jury awarded $4 million in punitive damages, while the other awarded no punitive damages at all. In cases involving accidents, civil rights and the environment, multimillion dollar punitive awards have been a subject of intense controversy. But how do juries actually make decisions about punitive damages? To find out, the authors - specialists in psychology, economics and the law - present the results of controlled experiments with over 600 mock juries involving the responses of more than 8,000 jury-eligible citizens. They find that although juries tended to agree in their moral judgements about the defendant's conduct, they rendered erratic and unpredictable dollar awards. Jurors also tended to ignore instructions from the judges; showed "hindsight bias", believing that what happened should have been foreseen; and penalized corporations that had based their decisions on careful cost-benefit analyses. While judges made many of the same errors, they performed better in some areas, suggesting that judges (or other specialists) may be better equipped than juries to decide punitive damages. With a wealth of new data and a host of provocative findings, this book documents a wide range of systematic bias in jury behaviour and should be valuable for anyone interested in punitive damages, jury behaviour, human psychology and the theory of punishment.

'Because the law of defamation is about reputation and thus necessarily about community and social attitudes, Baker's serious empirical analysis of just those community and social attitudes about defamation and about reputation is a novel and important contribution to the literature on libel and slander. It will be a useful corrective to the various empirically unsupported assertions that dominate the court cases and the academic literature on the topic.' - Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia, US 'This book shines a welcome light on a neglected area of defamation law: how juries and judges determine what it means to say a statement is defamatory. The author employs well-designed empirical research to provide concrete answers, and the reform he proposes is sensible and workable. The book should be must-reading for anyone who seeks to understand how the law does or does not protect reputation - especially lawyers and judges who try libel cases.' - David A. Anderson, University of Texas Law School, US 'When defamation jurors decide whether a statement about someone is ''defamatory'', the question for them to answer is whether it would generate disapproval among ''ordinary reasonable people''. It has generally been assumed that they answer this question correctly. What Roy Baker discovered through empirical research is that this assumption may often be wrong. This fascinating and important book sets out his findings, alongside a broad-ranging and perceptive analysis of the law's approach to defining ''defamatory''.' - Michael Chesterman, The University of New South Wales, Australia The common law determines whether a publication is defamatory by considering how 'ordinary reasonable people' would respond to it. But how does the law work in practice? Who are these 'ordinary reasonable people' and what do they think? This book examines the psychology behind how judges, juries and lawyers decide what is defamatory. Drawing on a thorough examination of case law, as well as extensive empirical research, including surveys involving over 4,000 members of the general public, interviews with judges and legal practitioners and focus groups representing various sections of the community, this book concludes that the law reflects fundamental misperceptions about what people think and how they are influenced by the media. The result is that the law tends to operate so as to unfairly disadvantage publishers, thus contributing to defamation law's infamous 'chilling effect' on free speech. This unique and controversial book will appeal to judges, defamation law practitioners and scholars in various common law jurisdictions, media outlets, academics engaged in researching and teaching torts and media law, as well as those working within the disciplines of media or communications studies and psychology. Anyone concerned with the law's interaction with public opinion, as well as how people interpret the media will find much to interest them in this fascinating study. Contents: 1. Introduction Part I: Asking the Defamation Question 2. Formulating the Test for Defamation 3. Refining the Test 4. Applying the Test Part II: Answering the Defamation Question 5. The Lawyers Answers 6. The Public's Answers 7. The Third-Person Effect 8. Accommodating the Third-Person Effect 9. Conclusion Bibliography Index

Providing a detailed overview of the law of nuisance this book addresses contentious issues such as the distinction between the rule in Rylands v Fletcher and the law of private nuisance; the law that excludes personal injuries from the remit of nuisance, and the relationship between public and private nuisance. The Law of Nuisance also considers statutory nuisance and the extent to which it can be seen to exceed private and public nuisances as well as utility of nuisance as an environmental tort. This book provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive treatment of the law of nuisance, drilling down to distinctions between these different types of nuisance as well as examining in detail the overlaps between them.

The economic torts for too long have been under-theorized and under-explored by academics and the judiciary alike. In recent years claimants have exploited the resulting chaos by attempting to use the economic torts in ever more exotic ways. This second edition of An Analysis of Econmic Torts, as before, attempts to provide practical legal research to both explore the ingredients of all these torts - both the general economic torts (inducing breach of contract, the unlawful means tort, intimidation, the conspiracy torts) and the misrepresentation economic torts (deceit, malicious falsehood and passing off) - and their rationales. And, as before, an optimum framework for these torts is suggested.
However that framework has to take on board the apparent tension within the House of Lords as revealed in the recent decisions in OBG v Allan and Total Network v Revenue. Over 100 years ago the House of Lords in the seminal decision of Allen v Flood in theory set the agenda for the modern development of the economic torts. The majority in that case adopted an abstentionist approach to liability for intentionally inflicted economic harm, so that even where intentional and unjustified economic harm was inflicted, liability would not necessarily follow. However, this clear framework for the torts was obscured by subsequent case law, leaving the economic torts in a hopeless muddle by the start of the twenty-first century. A chance to finally sort out this mess was presented to the House of Lords in 2007 in the shape of three conjoined appeals, reported under the name OBG v Allan. The thrust of the judgments was that a framework for the economic torts was to be established and dicta and decisions that caused problems and incoherence were to be named and shamed. Re-affirming the abstentionist philosophy of Allen v Flood Lord Hoffmann and Nicholls and Baroness Hale in part relied upon the first edition of An Analysis of the Economic Torts, Lord Hoffmann noting ..". if what I have said does anything to clarify what has been described as an extremely obscure branch of the law, much is owing to Hazel Carty's book An Analysis of the Economic Torts ." However, within 10 months of the OBG decision, a differently constituted HL in Total Network SL v Revenue & Customs Commissioners undermined this nascent coherence and did so by focusing on the conspiracy torts (previously dismissed by some commentators as anomalous or superfluous). Distinguishing OBG (which did not as such analyse the conspiracy torts) the House of Lords in Total Network may have shifted the general economic torts from the abstentionist to the interventionist track of development.
Thus it is suggested that conflicting agendas for general economic liability can be discerned in the OBG and Total Network judgments. These agendas are debated (against the background of the growing academic debate) and a coherent approach suggested. As for the misrepresentation torts their potential for development is also discussed and the peril of allowing them to transform into unfair trading or misappropriation torts is explained. As a result, the second edition involves a substantial re-write of the first edition. However, the thesis of the author remains that a coherent framework for these torts can best be constructed based on a narrow remit for the common law.

This pack includesThe Rome II Regulation and a brand new updating supplement which brings the main work up to date and incorporates substantive developments since publication of the book in December 2008.
The main work, The Rome II Regulation: The Law Applicable to Non-Contractual Obligations has become a major reference work to practitioners as it provides the first user-friendly article-by-article commentary to the Regulation. It considers related issues, such as the vires of the "Rome II Regulation" and its relationship to other EC instruments creating or affecting rules of private international law.
The brand new updating supplement updates the main work and draws attention to legislation implementing the Regulation in the United Kingdom, incorporates recent ECJ cases concerning other EC private international law instruments and new decisions of the English courts concerning the pre-Regulation rules of applicable law, and to recent books and journal articles providing further colour to the picture surrounding the Regulation since its adoption in January 2009. It maintains the currency of the main work and is an essential purchase for commercial law practitioners, academics and students with a special interest in cross-border issues.

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.

Since the financial crisis, one of the key priorities of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) has been individual accountability. This book addresses the regulatory and employment law challenges that arise from the FCA's and PRA's requirements. The expert team of writers examine in depth the provisions of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 which relate to individuals, and the associated requirements of the PRA and FCA. The topics addressed include: The Senior Manager, Certification and Approved Person Regimes Regulatory references and whistleblowing Disciplinary investigations, enforcement and sanctions Notifications, 'Form C', and fitness & propriety Bonus disputes and the Remuneration Code Conduct and Pay in the Financial Services Industry considers the full extent of an individual's employment, from pre-contractual discussions to the post-termination clawback of remuneration. It is a vital reference for lawyers and human resources professionals working within the financial services industry, both in-house and in private practice. It will also be of interest to all academics, regulators and policy-makers involved in this sector.

When the Victims' Compensation Fund was established following the events of 9/11, it set off a series of debates on the logic of compensation for victims of terrorist acts. Why do we generally compensate for injuries, and how do injuries and deaths caused by acts of terrorism differ from those caused by more ordinary means? What criteria should we consider when determining compensation: the financial need or deprivation or the survivors? the negligence of a public or private entity? Professor Marshall Shapo delves into these and other questions as he teases out the lines of the debate to present a framework for future lawmakers faced with shaping compensation programs for terrorist victims.

This new book is the first comprehensive and integrated account of the law on liability for negligent misstatements. Designed as a comprehensive guide for practitioners, it outlines the essential issues that must be considered in determining whether a client will have a cause of action for negligent misstatement. It will also discuss in detail those issues that are likely to prove most contentious. In England, liability for negligent misstatements provides the most important form of tortious redress for financial losses. The examination of this complex law takes place at a number of levels. First, the book attempts to unravel the 'three-stage test' which provides the conceptual framework within which duties of care are analysed in tort. An account of the function of each stage of the test is offered. Second, the book defines what constitutes 'physical damage' and 'pure economic loss' and examines the major ways in which the latter kind of loss arises. Third, the book outlines the elements of liability in physical damage and pure economic loss cases. The treatment of liability by negligent misstatements is completed with a full discussion of breach, causation, and the defences.

The law of torts is concerned with what we owe to one another in the way of obligations not to interfere with, or impair, each other's urgent interests as we go about our lives in civil society. The most influential contemporary account of tort law treats tort liability rules as shadow prices. Their role is not to vindicate claimants' own rights and interests, but to induce us to injure one another only when it is economically efficient to do so. The chief competitors to the economic view take tort law's importance to lie primarily in the duties of repair that it imposes on wrongdoers, or in the powers of recourse that it confers on the victims of tortious wrongs. This book argues that tort law's primary obligations address a domain of basic justice and that its rhetoric of reasonableness implies a distinctive morality of mutual right and responsibility. Modern tort law is preoccupied with, and responds to, the special moral significance of harm. That special significance sometimes justifies standards of precaution more stringent than those prescribed by efficiency. This book also examines the regulatory and administrative institutions with which the common law of torts cooperates and competes, treating these as part of a continuum of institutions that instantiate the primary role pursued by modern tort law - that is, to protect our physical integrity and other essential interests from impairment and interference by others, and to do so terms that all those affected might accept as justifiable.

This book provides fair and acceptable solutions to hardship issues in long-term relational supply contracts. This book uses an approach to strike a balance between the traditional approach underlying classical contract law which emphasises the almost absolute prevalence of the principle of pacta sunt servanda and a flexible approach that is based on the principle of clausula rebus sic stantibus. This book argues for an emerging principle of pacta sunt servanda bona fide on the basis of the relational contract theory. Additionally, this book demonstrates how good faith can serve as a foundation for imposing a duty to renegotiate on the parties. The aim of this book is rather to propose how relational contract theory can be applied to the analysis of specific legal rules in general. Lastly, this boos highlights how the duty to renegotiate and the power to adapt a contract can be further developed upon the occurrence of hardship, based on good faith and the relational nature and characteristics of a long-term relational supply contract. This book explores and enriches the existing research on relational contract theory concentrates primarily on its application in domestic contract laws, particularly in the regulation of long-term contracts in American contract law. As an outcome this book provides a more feasible and satisfactory approach for courts or arbitral tribunals to undertake when facing hardship issues in international contract disputes. Overall, hardship themes, long-term relational supply contracts and good faith are examined extensively.

The past decade has seen major developments in the law regarding personal injury claims which relate to psychiatric injury. The law is complex and in many respects illogical, and claims for damages for psychiatric conditions can be difficult to pursue. Now in its second edition, and substantially rewritten, Napier and Wheat's Recovering Damages for Psychiatric Injury reviews the legal context in which such claims must be framed.
The book concentrates on claims made in negligence and employers' liability, but also examines claims made in contract and in intentional torts. Claims are divided up into the so-called 'shock' cases and non-shock cases, and the author has also included a new chapter on employers' liability with particular focus on 'stress' claims. Two chapters are devoted to the medical aspects of psychiatric injury claims, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The book contains analyses of the main cases which have shaped the present state of the law and examines some options for reform.
The author gives practical advice on how to identify a potential psychiatric injury case, quantum of damages, and procedural steps. This second edition also includes an outline of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme. Aimed primarily at legal practitioners, the book will also be of interest to students and members of the medical profession.

The Law of Limitation offers a comprehsive analysis of the impact of periods of limitation on civil litigation in England and Wales.
It examines the individual periods of limitation prescribed by the Limitation Act 1980 (as amended) in respect of specific causes of action and concludes with a discussion of the principal statutory limitation periods other than those governed by the 1980 Act.
The book also contains an Appendix of useful precedents

This is the first practitioner's work on the new rule (19.III) on Group Litigation Orders under the Civil Procedure Rules. It provides exhaustive analysis of the new rule and relates it to the extensive experience which has been gained in the major multi-party actions of recent years, setting out the key lessons to be learned in terms of how such actions should be managed. Case studies include the Sellafield radiation claims, the Lloyd's litigation, Norplant, the British Coal Vibration White Finger litigation, and other major cases.

The contemporary landscape of transnational political economy is dominated by networks. Public and private networks, and networks that combine public and private actors, cross borders, exert regulatory power and their activities often harm third parties. However, tort law as a traditional source of remediation for third party harms appears impotent when faced with the problem of regulating the 'society of networks'. This book, using a systems theory framework, retraces the emergence of tort law in modernity and highlights how two models of normative ascription - personal responsibility and organizational liability - have come to shape existing tort law's ambivalence towards network phenomena. This book breaks new ground by leaving behind the national law 'frame of reference', drawing on the conceptual promise of EU law to develop a concept of 'network responsibility' for a network society and lays the foundations of a tort law for the 21st century.

Maimonides lived in Spain and Egypt in the twelfth century, and is perhaps the most widely studied figure in Jewish history. This book presents, for the first time, Maimonides' complete tort theory and how it compares with other tort theories both in the Jewish world and beyond. Drawing on sources old and new as well as religious and secular, Maimonides and Contemporary Tort Theory offers fresh interdisciplinary perspectives on important moral, consequentialist, economic, and religious issues that will be of interest to both religious and secular scholars. The authors mention several surprising points of similarity between certain elements of theories recently formulated by North American scholars and the Maimonidean theory. Alongside these similarities significant differences are also highlighted, some of them deriving from conceptual-jurisprudential differences and some from the difference between religious law and secular-liberal law.

The imposition of strict liability in tort law is controversial, and its theoretical foundations are the object of vigorous debate. Why do or should we impose strict liability on employers for the torts committed by their employees, or on a person for the harm caused by their children, animals, activities, or things? In responding to this type of questions, legal actors rely on a wide variety of justifications. Justifying Strict Liability explores, in a comparative perspective, the most significant arguments that are put forward to justify the imposition of strict liability in four legal systems, two common law, England and the United States, and two civil law, France and Italy. These justifications include: risk, accident avoidance, the 'deep pockets' argument, loss-spreading, victim protection, reduction in administrative costs, and individual responsibility. By looking at how these arguments are used across the four legal systems, this book considers a variety of patterns which characterise the reasoning on strict liability. The book also assesses the justificatory weight of the arguments, showing that these can assume varying significance in the four jurisdictions and that such variations reflect different views as to the values and goals which inspire strict liability and tort law more generally. Overall, the book seeks to improve our understanding of strict liability, to shed light on the justifications for its imposition, and to enhance our understanding of the different tort cultures featuring in the four legal systems studied.

This book is a penetrating account of the singular way in which the American tort system has evolved and works today. Drawing on years of international experience, Fleming discusses such topics as judicial activism, the jury in civil trials, trial lawyers, contingent fees, and mass litigation.

This collection of essays represents a ground-breaking collaboration between moral philosophers, action theorists, lawyers and legal theorists to set a fresh research agenda on agency and responsibility in negligence. The complex phenomenon of responsibility in negligence is analysed from multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives, shedding light on key ethical and legal issues related to agency and negligence to impact substantive law and policy-making in different jurisdictions. The volume introduces new debates and questions old assumptions, inviting the reader to rethink substantive law and practical ethical reflection.

The principal concern of the law of torts is to repair accident losses. but its role has altered over the years as a result of such factors as the wider use of private and liability insurance. This completely revised and updated edition looks at the effect of these changes on the law, and an entirely new chapter compares tort with no-fault compensation in the light of accepted accident compensation policies.

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from pre-natal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and non-economic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, and lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience.

By rewriting both canonical and lesser-known tort cases from a feminist perspective, this volume exposes gender and racial bias in how courts have categorized and evaluated harm stemming from pre-natal malpractice, pregnancy loss, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, invasion of privacy, and the award of economic and non-economic damages. The rewritten opinions demonstrate that when confronted with gendered harm to women, courts have often distorted or misapplied conventional legal doctrine to diminish the harm or deny recovery. Bringing this implicit bias to the surface can make law students, and lawyers and judges who craft arguments and apply tort doctrines, more aware of inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation or identity. This volume shows the way forward to make the basic doctrines of tort law more responsive to the needs and perspectives of traditionally marginalized people, in ways that give greater value to harms that they disproportionately experience.

Maimonides lived in Spain and Egypt in the twelfth century, and is perhaps the most widely studied figure in Jewish history. This book presents, for the first time, Maimonides' complete tort theory and how it compares with other tort theories both in the Jewish world and beyond. Drawing on sources old and new as well as religious and secular, Maimonides and Contemporary Tort Theory offers fresh interdisciplinary perspectives on important moral, consequentialist, economic, and religious issues that will be of interest to both religious and secular scholars. The authors mention several surprising points of similarity between certain elements of theories recently formulated by North American scholars and the Maimonidean theory. Alongside these similarities significant differences are also highlighted, some of them deriving from conceptual-jurisprudential differences and some from the difference between religious law and secular-liberal law.