Category Archives: Tort
Reviews of Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory (January 2026)
The Shame of Mass Torts (Anthony Sebok): The Pain Brokers by Prof Elizabeth Burch (Georgia) describes the terrible treatment suffered by a group of women who had a defective surgical device implanted into their bodies. Unlike the more familiar stories about products liability involving DES or asbestos, The Pain Brokers focuses not on the wrongdoing […]
Matthew Maury, ‘When Products Interfere: An Interference Approach to Product-Based Public Nuisance’
ABSTRACT Public nuisance claims have driven multi-billion-dollar settlements against opioid and tobacco companies over harms to public health. Moreover, state and local governments have filed a torrent of recent public nuisance actions against, eg, firearm companies over gun violence, fossil fuel companies over climate change, and e-cigarette companies over teenage vaping. These actions remain vigorously […]
NA Moreham, ‘Privacy and the right to tell your own story’
ABSTRACT This article examines when and how a person’s desire to tell their own story should affect the application of the English misuse of private information tort. It urges caution in cases where one party is trying to dictate retrospectively the terms on which a shared encounter occurred – especially when there is a significant […]
Aryan Mohseni, ‘What (is) a nuisance: Hunt Leather Pty Ltd v Transport for NSW’
ABSTRACT By a slim majority of 3-2, the High Court of Australia in Hunt Leather Pty Ltd v Transport for NSW [2025] HCA 53 has now endorsed the test for private nuisance laid out by the UK Supreme Court in Fearn v Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery [2023] UKSC 4; [2024] AC 1. […]
Ovčak and Božič Penko, ‘The Role of the Psychiatric Expert In Tort Litigation’
ABSTRACT The paper analyses the evidentiary function of psychiatric expertise in tort proceedings, emphasizing its significance within Slovenian contractual and non-contractual liability regimes. Psychiatric experts are essential in establishing causation and assessing the extent of non-pecuniary damage, thereby shaping judicial determinations of fault and compensation. Effective adjudication requires reciprocal legal-medical literacy: judges should understand the […]
Steve Novaković, ‘Shielded from Shame: Civil Immunity for Ontario’s Long-Term Care Facilities in the Wake of COVID-19’
ABSTRACT This article critically examines the Supporting Ontario’s Recovery Act, 2020 (‘SORA’) and the civil immunity it extends, inter alia, to Ontario’s long-term care facilities (‘LTCFs’) in the wake of the novel coronavirus (‘COVID-19’) pandemic. It concludes that tort law is a necessary vehicle for accountability and systemic change and should not be proscribed. Part […]
Jurcys, Kozuka and Fenwick, ‘A Private Law Framework for Personal AI Replicas: A Comprehensive Analysis of Legal Issues’
ABSTRACT This Article examines the emerging legal framework governing digital duplicates and personal AI replicas – AI systems designed to emulate the knowledge, personality, or communicative style of real individuals. As such technologies proliferate across education, commerce, entertainment, and healthcare, they challenge foundational doctrines of private law, including, inter alia, intellectual property, data protection, personality […]
Claire Bessant, ‘The expanded scope of the tort of misuse of private information: a tort protecting individual and family privacy’
ABSTRACT The House of Lords’ decision in Campbell v MGN [2004] UKHL 22 is celebrated for having introduced a new cause of action into English law: the tort of misuse of private information (MPI). Whilst in Campbell, the tort’s role in protecting the individual claimant and their private life is emphasised, subsequently the tort has […]
Barbara von Tigerstrom, ‘Informed Consent, Causation, and the “Reasonable Patient”’
ABSTRACT In medical negligence claims involving ‘informed consent’, claimants must prove that a physician failed in their duty to provide adequate information, and that this failure caused the patient’s injury. In Canada, unlike in Australia or the UK, the common law has adopted a ‘modified objective’ test to analyze the decision component of causation in […]
Kenneth Grad, ‘Beyond Public Law: Recognizing a Tort Remedy for Hate Speech in Canada’
Rising hate speech in Canada has led to significant attention and concern among politicians, policymakers, and commentators. Legal responses to this phenomenon have focused almost entirely on public law, with recent years marked by determined efforts by Parliament to expand the criminal law’s role through the creation of new hate-speech offences. However, criminal prosecutions for […]