The delict of iniuria is among the most sophisticated products of the Roman legal tradition. The original focus of the delict was assault, although iniuria-literally a wrong or unlawful act-indicated a very wide potential scope. Yet it quickly grew to include sexual harassment and defamation, and by the first century CE it had been re-oriented around the concept of contumelia so as to incorporate a range of new wrongs, including insult and invasion of privacy. In truth, it now comprised all attacks on personality. It is the Roman delict of iniuria which forms the foundation of both the South African and-more controversially-Scots laws of injuries to personality. On the other hand, iniuria is a concept formally alien to English law. But as its title suggests, this book of essays is representative of a species of legal scholarship best described as 'oxymoronic comparative law', employing a concept peculiar to one legal tradition in order to interrogate another where, apparently, it does not belong. Addressing a series of doctrinal puzzles within the law of assault, defamation and breach of privacy, it considers in what respects the Roman delict of iniuria overlaps with its modern counterparts in England, Scotland and South Africa; the differences and similarities between the analytical frameworks employed in the ancient and modern law; and the degree to which the Roman proto-delict points the way to future developments in each of these three legal systems.

The common law, despite procedural divisions, has only ever had one class of civil wrongs. The civilians, by contrast, have typically split their law of wrongs in two, one group being called "delicts" and the other "quasi-delicts." Yet this division, which originated in Roman law, remains mysterious: it is clear neither where the line was drawn nor why a separation was made along this line.
This book does two things. In the first two parts, it investigates the origins of the division and its development in a modern civilian jurisdiction, France. What is argued for is that the Roman dichotomy was originally one between fault (culpa)-based and situational liability, which was prompted by a historical contraction of the Roman concept of a wrong (delictum). French law, building on medieval interpretations of the division, redrew the line one level higher, between deliberate and negligent wrongdoing. By doing so, it involved itself in severe taxonomical difficulties, which the book explores.
The third part of the work concerns itself with the significance of the civilian division of wrongs according to degrees of blameworthiness (dolus, culpa, casus) for the common law. A provocative thesis is developed, in effect, that there is a strong case for the adoption of a similar trichotomy as the first-level division of the English law of civil wrongs. From its formulary age, English law has inherited an unstable taxonomy where wrongs intersect. The existence of these mismatched categories continues to cause significant difficulties, which a realignment of causes of action along the above lines would rectify.