Providing a detailed analysis of the legal principles in England & Wales, this book looks at governing compensation claims for the lasting trauma caused by child abuse. Its pages discuss the merits and demerits of different forms of action as mechanisms for imposing liability for abuse, how compensable psychiatric damage can be proved and how the law deals with complex issues of duty of care, causation and extending limitation periods in the context of abuse cases. Whilst a substantial portion of the book deals with civil claims by the abused for the psychological harm caused by the abuse, coverage also extends to litigation by other parties involved directly or indirectly in abuse allegations. Also included is a significant comparative element, drawing upon jurisdictions such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as a means of speculating how our own legal system might develop.

A contextualised study setting out the foundations of administrative law, with discussion of case law and legislation to show practical application.

The development of private law across the common law world is typically portrayed as a series of incremental steps, each one delivered as a result of judges dealing with marginally different factual circumstances presented to them for determination. This is said to be the common law method. According to this process, change might be assumed to be gradual, almost imperceptible. If this were true, however, then even Darwinian-style evolution – which is subject to major change-inducing pressures, such as the death of the dinosaurs – would seem unlikely in the law, and radical and revolutionary paradigms shifts perhaps impossible. And yet the history of the common law is to the contrary. The legal landscape is littered with quite remarkable revolutionary and evolutionary changes in the shape of the common law. The essays in this volume explore some of the highlights in this fascinating revolutionary and evolutionary development of private law. The contributors expose the nature of the changes undergone and their significance for the future direction of travel. They identify the circumstances and the contexts which might have provided an impetus for these significant changes. The essays range across all areas of private law, including contract, tort, unjust enrichment and property. No area has been immune from development. That fact itself is unsurprising, but an extended examination of the particular circumstances and contexts which delivered some of private law's most important developments has its own special significance for what it might indicate about the shape, and the shaping, of private law regimes in the future.

Focusing on a matter of continuing contemporary significance, this book is the first work to offer an in-depth exploration of exploitation in the doctor-patient relationship. It provides a theoretical analysis of the concept of exploitation, setting out exploitation’s essential elements within the authors’ account of wrongful exploitation. It then presents a contextual analysis of exploitation in the doctor-patient relationship, considering the dynamics of this fiduciary relationship, the significance of vulnerability, and the reasons why exploitation in this relationship is particularly wrongful. Two case studies – sexual exploitation and assisted dying – are employed to assess what the appropriate legal, ethical and regulatory responses to exploitation should be, to identify common themes regarding the doctor’s behaviour (such as the use of undue influence as a conduit through which to take advantage of and misuse patients), and to illustrate the effects of exploitation on patients. A recurring question addressed is how exploitation in the doctor-patient relationship is and should be dealt with by ethics, regulators and the law, and whether exploitation in this relationship is a special case. The book provides a critical, interdisciplinary evaluation of exploitation in the doctor-patient relationship that will be of interest to health care lawyers, bioethicists, legal academics and practitioners, health care professionals and policymakers.

This book is the one place to find unprecedented access to case-law, doctrinal debates and comparative reflections on vicarious liability from across the common law world. The doctrine of vicarious liability, that is strict liability for the torts of others, represents one of the most controversial areas of tort law. Unsurprisingly it is a doctrine that has been discussed in the highest courts of common law jurisdictions. This collection responds to uncertainties as to the operation of vicarious liability in twenty-first century tort law by looking at key common law jurisdictions and asking expert scholars to set out and critically analyse the law, identifying factors influencing change and the extent to which case-law from other common law jurisdictions has been influential. The jurisdictions covered include Canada, England and Wales, Australia, Singapore, Ireland, Hong Kong and New Zealand. In providing critical analysis of this important topic, it will be essential and compelling reading for all scholars of tort law and practitioners working in this field.

In this book, James Gallen provides an in-depth evaluation of the responses of Western States and churches to their historical abuses from a transitional justice perspective. Using a comparative lens, this book examines the application of transitional justice to address and redress the past in Ireland, Australia, Canada, the United States and United Kingdom. It evaluates the use of public inquiries and truth commissions, litigation, reparations, apologies, and reconciliation in each context to address these abuses. Significantly, this novel analysis considers how power and public emotions influence, and often impede, transitional justice's ability to address historical-structural injustices. In addressing historical abuses, power fails to be redistributed and national and religious myths are not reconsidered, leading Gallen to conclude that the existing transitional justice efforts of states and churches remain an unrepentant form of justice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This volume brings together some of the best journal articles of the last twenty years which deal with various aspects of the relationship between parents and children. Adopting an inter-disciplinary and comparative approach, the book reproduces articles from a variety of journals in law and the social sciences. The book is divided into eight parts dealing, respectively, with becoming a parent; the status and obligations of parenthood; issues of upbringing; adolescence; child support; parental separation, divorce and children; child abuse and state intervention; social parenthood and adoption. The volume includes a substantial introduction by the editor.