Tort law and criminal law are closely bound together but their relationship rarely receives sustained and rigorous scrutiny. This is the first significant project in England and Wales to address that shortcoming. Building on growing interest amongst both academics and practitioners in the relationship between tort and crime, it draws together leading experts to chart the field and explore key points of interest. It uses a range of perspectives from legal theory, doctrine, legal history and comparative law to address some of the most important and interesting links between tort and crime. Examples include how the illegality defence operates to avoid stultification of the law, the difference between criminal and civil causation, how the Motor Insurers' Bureau not only insures but acts to enforce laws and alter behaviour, and why civil law only very rarely restores specific property but the criminal law does it daily.

First English-language comparative volume to study where, how and why tort and crime interact. Covers common and civil law countries.

This book is the first in a series of essay collections on defences in private law. It addresses defences to liability arising in tort. The essays range from those adopting a primarily doctrinal approach to others that examine the law from a more theoretical or historical perspective. Some essays focus on individual defences, while some are concerned with the links between defences, or with how defences relate to the structure of tort law as a whole. A number of the essays also draw upon concepts and literature that have been developed mainly in relation to the criminal law, and consider their application to tort law. The essays make several original contributions to this complex, important but neglected field of academic enquiry.

Crime, Shame and Reintegration is a contribution to general criminological theory. Its approach is as relevant to professional burglary as to episodic delinquency or white collar crime. Braithwaite argues that some societies have higher crime rates than others because of their different processes of shaming wrongdoing. Shaming can be counterproductive, making crime problems worse. But when shaming is done within a cultural context of respect for the offender, it can be an extraordinarily powerful, efficient and just form of social control. Braithwaite identifies the social conditions for such successful shaming. If his theory is right, radically different criminal justice policies are needed - a shift away from punitive social control toward greater emphasis on moralizing social control. This book will be of interest not only to criminologists and sociologists, but to those in law, public administration and politics who are concerned with social policy and social issues.

Explains the development of tort law and criminal law in England by reference to other legal systems from 1850-2020.

The fields of tort and crime have much in common in practice, particularly in how they both try to respond to wrongs and regulate future behaviour. Despite this commonality in fact, fascinating difficulties have hitherto not been resolved about how legal systems co-ordinate (or leave wild) the border between tort and crime. What is the purpose of tort law and criminal law, and how do you tell the difference between them? Do criminal lawyers and civil lawyers reason and argue in the same way? Are the rules on capacity, consent, fault, causation, secondary liability or defences the same in tort as in crime? How do the rules of procedure operate for each area? Are there points of overlap? When, how and why do tort and crime interact? This volume systematically answers these and other questions for eight legal systems: England, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Scotland, the Netherlands and Australia.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

The law of torts recognises many defences to liability. While some of these defences have been explored in detail, scant attention has been given to the theoretical foundations of defences generally. In particular, no serious attempt has been made to explain how defences relate to each other or to the torts to which they pertain. The goal of this book is to reduce the size of this substantial gap in our understanding of tort law. The principal way in which it attempts to do so is by developing a taxonomy of defences. The book shows that much can be learned about a given defence from the way in which it is classified. This book has been awarded Joint Second Prize for the 2014 Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.