Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
Bangladesh is often described as a jurisdiction in which tort law is absent or seriously underdeveloped. That description captures the rarity of reported tort litigation but obscures a more complicated remedial structure. Ordinary courts recognise negligence and vicarious liability; sector-specific statutes provide compensation for death, workplace injury, road crashes and custodial abuse; and the High Court Division has used Article 102 of the Constitution to award public-law compensation for serious violations of fundamental rights. The central problem is therefore not legal non-existence but remedial coordination. The same injury may implicate private law, a statutory scheme and constitutional review, yet Bangladeshi law offers no general account of when those routes are alternative, cumulative or exclusive. This article reconstructs that architecture and tests it comparatively. India is used to examine constitutional compensation; England and Wales to assess public-authority negligence; the ECHR to test effective-remedy logic; and the Principles of European Tort Law, together with targeted contrasts to Italy and Spain, to examine what codification and remedial coordination can realistically achieve. The analysis identifies five recurring weaknesses: unstable approaches to damages, uncertainty over the legal effect of statutory payments, an underdeveloped test for public-authority liability, route-sensitive limitation and procedural timing, and insufficient separation of constitutional vindication from ordinary compensation. It argues against both immediate wholesale codification and uncontrolled constitutionalisation. Instead, it proposes a layered remedial framework: private tort should develop through reasoned precedent; statutory schemes should state whether they supplement or displace civil liability; Article 102 compensation should be reserved for serious public-law wrongs; and overlapping remedies should be coordinated through explicit anti-gap and antidouble-recovery rules. The comparative materials are not treated as models for transplantation. They show why coherence depends less on possessing a single code than on making liability, institutional function and remedial consequences explicit.

Akram, Arafat Rahman, Tort Liability and Remedial Fragmentation in Bangladesh: A Comparative European Perspective: Private Law, Statutory Compensation and Constitutional Remedies (August 18, 2026).