In 1992, an underground explosion at the Westray Mine in Plymouth,
Nova Scotia, killed twenty-six miners. Although the owners of the mine
were charged criminally, no one was convicted, largely because it was
deemed too difficult to determine legal responsibility.
More than a decade after the Westray disaster, the federal
government introduced revisions to the "Criminal Code" aimed at
strengthening corporate criminal liability. Bill C-45, dubbed the
Westray bill, requires employers to ensure a safe workplace and
attributes criminal liability to organizations for seriously injuring
or killing workers and/or the public. Yet, while the federal government
declared the Westray bill an important step, the law has thus far
failed to produce a crackdown on corporate crime.
In "Still Dying for a Living, " Steven Bittle turns a critical
eye on Canada's corporate criminal liability law. Drawing
theoretical inspiration from Foucauldian and neo-Marxist literatures
and interweaving in-depth interviews and parliamentary transcripts,
Bittle reveals how legal, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding
the Westray bill downplayed the seriousness of workplace injury and
death, effectively characterizing these crimes as regrettable but
largely unavoidable accidents. As long as the primary causes of
workplace injury and death are not properly scrutinized, Bittle argues,
workers will continue to die in the pursuit of earning a living.Steven Bittle is an assistant professor in the
Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.

Does private law punish? This collection answers this complex but compelling question. Lawyers from across the spectrum of the law (contract, tort, restitution) explore exactly how it punishes wrong doing. These leading voices ask whether that punishment is effective and what its societal role might be. Taking the discussion out of the technical and into a broader realms of a wider purpose, it is both compelling and thought-provoking.

Gradually, the law of tort has shifted away from a strict-liability approach to one where fault predominates. This book charts important case law documenting this shift. It seeks to understand how and why it occurred. Given that the Rylands v Fletcher decision is typically seen as a prime exemplar of strict liability, it focusses particularly on that case, as part of the historical development of tort law. It considers the intellectual arguments made in favour of strict liability, and for fault-based liability. Having done so, it then focusses on particular areas of the law of tort, including nuisance, defamation and trespass. It is somewhat anomalous that though most would view these as examples of torts of strict liability, fault considerations have become prominent in their application. This presents an uneasy compromise, where torts that are notionally strict in nature are infused with fault considerations, often through exceptions or defences. This book advocates for further development in the law of tort to better reflect a primarily fault-based approach to liability, at least in the common law. This would make the law of tort more coherent.

The publication of Scholars of Tort Law marks the beginning of a long overdue rebalancing of private law scholarship. Instead of concentrating on judicial decisions and academic commentary only for what that commentary says about judicial decisions, the book explores the contributions of scholars of tort law in their own right. The work of a selection of leading scholars of tort law from across the common law world, ranging from Thomas Cooley (1824-1898) to Patrick Atiyah (1931-2018), is addressed by eminent current scholars in the field. The focus of the contributions is on the nature of the work produced by each of the scholars in question, important influences on their work, and the influence which that work in turn had on thinking about tort law. The process of subjecting tort law scholarship to sustained analysis provides new insights into the intellectual development of tort law and reveals the important role played by scholars in that development. By focusing on the work of influential tort scholars, the book serves to emphasise the importance of legal scholarship to the development of the common law more generally.

"Injury" offers the first sustained anthropological analysis and critique of American injury law. The book approaches injury law as a symptom of a larger American injury culture, rather than as a tool of social justice or as a form of regulation. In doing so, it offers a new understanding of the problematic role that law plays in constructing Americans' relations with the objects they consume.

Through lively historical analyses of consumer products and workplace objects ranging from cigarettes to cheeseburgers and computer keyboards to airbags, Jain lucidly illustrates the real limits of the product safety laws that seek to redress consumer and worker injury. The book draws from a wide range of materials to demonstrate that American law sets out injury as an exceptional state, one that can be redressed through imperfect systems of monetary compensation. "Injury" demonstrates how laws are unable to accommodate the ways in which physical differences among citizens are imposed by the physical objects of culture that distribute risk differently among populations. The book moves between detailed accounts of individual legal cases; historical analyses of advertising, product design, regulation, and legal history; and a wide reading of cultural theory.

Drawing on an extensive knowledge of law and social theory, this innovative book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in design, consumption, and the politics of injury.