Category Archives: Tort
Kerry Sun, ‘Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia 2026 SCC 16: a new tort of intimate partner violence’
INTRODUCTION In Ahluwalia v Ahluwalia, the Supreme Court of Canada took the unprecedented step of inaugurating a novel ‘tort of intimate partner violence’ targeting coercive control. In giving benediction to this new nominate tort, the judgment charts a creative path for the law of torts in Canada, which will be of interest to Anglo-Commonwealth scholars […]
Paula Giliker, ‘Solving the “parent company problem”: should parent companies be held directly or vicariously liable for the torts of their subsidiaries?’
INTRODUCTION In Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell plc, the UK Supreme Court examined a claim in the law of tort against the parent company of an overseas subsidiary. The case involved allegations of serious environmental pollution and damage caused by oil leaks in the Niger Delta from pipelines and associated infrastructure operated by the defendant’s […]
Marco Cappelletti, ‘Rylands v Fletcher Redux: Rubis Bahamas Ltd v Russell’
ABSTRACT The decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Rubis Bahamas Ltd v Russell is the most significant development in the law of Rylands v Fletcher for decades. Rejecting the view that the rule is merely a sub-species of private nuisance, the Committee reconstructed it as an independent rule of strict liability […]
Lazcano and Jaime, ‘Damage To Social Life as an Autonomous Loss in Contemporary Civil Liability’
ABSTRACT This article analyzes, from both a doctrinal and jurisprudential perspective, the category of harm to social life within contemporary civil liability. In contrast to the old, purely patrimonial paradigm, this research addresses the evolution of non-material damages, highlighting the autonomy of relational harm from traditional moral damages. While the latter compensates for internal affliction […]
Enrico Baffi, ‘To Provide for Damages Is Not to Authorize: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Tort Law in Italy’
ABSTRACT This paper examines whether Italian tort law can properly be described through the liability rule model developed by Calabresi and Melamed. It argues that the conventional law-and-economics view of tort liability as a system that permits harmful conduct subject to the payment of damages does not accurately describe the structure of Italian law. The […]
Stephen Bailey, ‘The limits of Fairchild: scientific impossibility’
PRINCIPLES It is clear law that, to establish causation in fact in a tort case, it must normally be shown that the defendant’s wrongful act or omission played a necessary part in bringing about the harm (commonly loss or damage, sometimes invasion of a protected right). The most significant exception comprises cases where it is […]
Douglas Brodie, ‘Stress at work: contemporary expectations and common law hurdles’
INTRODUCTION As is well known, an employer’s liability in negligence for psychiatric harm is limited by the guidelines set out by the Court of Appeal in Hatton v Sutherland (Hatton) and approved by the House of Lords in Barber v Somerset (Barber). It is though worth highlighting that Hatton is now 25 years old and […]
Thomas Galligan, ‘Death in Admiralty’
ABSTRACT This is an article about legal history: the development of the law governing recovery for wrongful death in American admiralty law. Simultaneously, because the discussion spans the time period from 1865 to the present, it is a piece about the current state of the law. But it is also a lament. It is a […]
Haim Abraham, ‘X v The Lord Advocate: Challenges and Concerns for Vicarious Liability’
ABSTRACT In X v The Lord Advocate, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom held that the Crown cannot be vicariously liable for torts committed by judges. This case note critically examines what could be viewed as two significant doctrinal shifts that were introduced by this ruling. First, it considers whether the ‘five incidents test’ […]
Kyle Bradley, ‘Reviving the Medical Monitoring Class Action’
ABSTRACT The class action was designed to provide peace to a group of wronged plaintiffs with similar claims. When individuals are harmed by toxic exposure but have yet to manifest an injury, those persons often want justice in the form of a simple remedy: medical monitoring. Medical monitoring is unique in that it enables both […]