Understanding Tort Claims and Illegality

A magisterial comparative study of the unity and convergence of courts’ approaches when addressing illegal tort claims.

This landmark collection provides new insights, concepts and techniques to understand and respond to tort claims based on illegal conduct.

It is the first comparative study of this difficult field, which has remained contested despite numerous decisions of the highest courts in the common law world. The collection draws on scholars from common law and civilian jurisdictions spanning Argentina, Australia, Brazil, England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, South Africa and Sweden. Together they set out fact patterns, and justifications for tort liability to illustrate the coherence and unity that exists when courts address such claims. While common law legal systems have developed a specific defence of illegality for some of those fact patterns, civilian jurisdictions tend to see illegality operating, if at all, through the existing components of tort liability. The book explains how these different approaches have been reached, how they work, and what they reveal about reasoning in tort.