Your search

In 2015 a new offence came into effect in England and Wales: controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship. Three years later, similar offences were introduced in Scotland and Ireland. And it is perhaps less well known that France introduced a comparable offence in 2010 and the Australian State of Tasmania had introduced related offences of economic and emotional abuse in 2004. These offences, which criminalise non-physical abuse in domestic relationships, constitute a novel development in the criminal law, with distinctive features and challenges. This article discusses a number of legal issues that have emerged from the operation of the new offence in England and Wales. An analysis of prosecutions for controlling or coercive behaviour (235 successful convictions have been identified as of December 2018) gives some insight into special features of the offence and its impact. In the absence of primary data (such as case reports) or comprehensive secondary statistical data, media reports of cases in which people have been charged with and/or convicted of the new offence in England and Wales since it came into operation in December 2015 provide a useful basis on which to explore the operation of the offence. Our research appears to have identified about half of all successful prosecutions (107 cases) as of 28 April 2018, which was 28 months after the offence came into effect. As these reports were primarily descriptive accounts of judges’ in-court remarks, they provide an adequate basis on which to make some preliminary observations. This article identifies four legal issues that have emerged in the operation of the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour: uncertainty about which relationships are captured by the new offence; how to preserve the principle of non-retroactivity when criminalising courses of conduct (involving behaviours that may have been manifest for many years); evidentiary difficulties in criminalising courses of conduct (patterns of behaviour); and reconciling an apparent overlap between the new offence and traditional assault and threat offences.

There has been a growing momentum toward a greater recognition and explicit use of Indigenous laws in the past several years. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, the revitalization and recognition of Indigenous laws are essential to reconciliation in Canada. How, then, do we go about doing this? In this article, we introduce one method, which we believe has great potential for working respectfully and productively with Indigenous laws today. We engage with Indigenous legal traditions by carefully and consciously applying adapted common law tools, such as legal analysis and synthesis, to existing and often publicly available Indigenous resources: stories, narratives, and oral histories. By bringing common pedagogical approaches from many Indigenous legal traditions together with standard common law legal education, we hope to help people learn Indigenous laws from an internal point of view. We share experiences that reveal that this method holds great potential as a pedagogical bridge “into” respectful engagement with Indigenous laws and legal thought, within and across Indigenous, academic, and professional communities. In conclusion, we argue that, while this method is a useful tool, it is not intended to supplant existing learning and teaching methods, but rather to supplement them. In practice, we have seen that this method can be complementary to learning deeply through other means. There are many methods to engage with Indigenous laws, and there needs to be critical reflection and conversations about them all.

"The purpose of this report is to document, from a family law perspective, best practice options when domestic violence cases are making their way through multiple proceedings (criminal, civil, family, and child protection). The intention is to identify practices that can promote the safety of family members, particularly children, while also ensuring fair, due process"-- Executive summary.

"The aim of this text is to provide a revealing background to the law of torts for its better understanding and appreciation by those who find themselves somewhat confused as to the true nature and scope of this part of the law and would like some clarification. This book consists of a number of independent essays that raise and discuss ideas which permeate the modern content and function of the law of torts. They also provide an historical context that allows the reader to better understand tort law concepts. Their purpose is to stimulate the interest of the read and encourage them to dive further into this area of the law. As such, this text is broader in scope than a standard primer of the law of torts express in simple language."-- Provided by publisher.

This article seeks to identify the nature of vindication as a distinctive function within the English law of torts. It argues that a specific conception of vindication explains fundamental features of the law of torts, variations in the structure of different torts, as well as variations in the approach to damages from one tort to another, which are not explicable by reference to well-documented functions of torts, such as compensation and punishment. According to this conception vindication entails attesting to, affirming and reinforcing the importance of those interests that are the subject of the law’s protection and their inherent value, and by association the importance of the overlying legal rights. The emphasis on vindication varies across torts; the torts actionable per se are paradigm examples of torts that have vindication as their primary function.The focus of this article is on how the over-arching vindicatory function of a tort shapes the approach to compensatory damages. It is submitted that for torts which have vindication as their primary function damages are available for the wrongful interference with the interest protected by the tort, in and of itself. Such damages compensate for a damage that is ‘normative’ in nature, are assessed objectively, and are awarded notwithstanding whether the claimant suffers any negative psychological, physical, emotional or economic effects in consequence of the wrong. The article goes on to analyse the relationship between vindication and non-compensatory damages, including the novel head of ‘vindicatory damages’.

McGill Law Journal Revue de droit de McGill PRIVACY, CORRECTIVE JUSTICE, AND INCREMENTALISM: LEGAL IMAGINATION AND THE RECOGNITION OF A PRIVACY TORT IN ONTARIO Thomas DC Bennett* This article considers the nature of com- mon law development as exemplified by the re- cent privacy case of Jones v. Tsige. The author focuses on Jones, in … Continued

Many scholars have offered theories that purport to explain the whole of the law of torts. At least some of these theories do not seem to be specific to a single jurisdiction. Several appear to endeavor to account for tort law in at least the major common law jurisdictions or even throughout the common law world. These include Ernest Weinrib's corrective justice theory, Robert Stevens's rights theory, and Richard Posner's economic theory. This article begins by explaining why it is appropriate to understand these three theories as universal theories of tort law and why it is important that they be so understood. This explanation draws upon various overt claims (or other strong intimations) made by the theorists themselves to the effect that this is how their respective accounts should be understood. The article then proceeds to test these theories, all of which are leading accounts of tort law, against the evidence in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The parts of tort law on which we focus are (1) the breach element of the action in negligence, (2) the law that determines when a duty of care will be owed in respect of pure economic loss, (3) the law that governs the availability of punitive damages, (4) the defense of illegality, and (5) the rule in Rylands v. Fletcher and its descendants. The article concludes that none of the theories is a satisfactory universal account of tort law. All of them suffer from significant problems of fit in that they cannot accommodate (often even approximately) the areas of law that we discuss. Although each of the theories contains a great many valuable insights, they all nonetheless fall well short of accomplishing that which they are held out as providing. In the course of this analysis, the article explains why this is an appropriate line of criticism and identifies the degree of lack of fit that we regard as being “significant.”

This article reviews the background, introduction, and critical response to new criminal offenses of coercive control in England/Wales and Scotland. How the new Scottish offense is implemented will determine whether it can overcome the shortcomings of the English law. We then review new evidence on four dimensions of coercive control: the relationship between “control” and “violence,” coercive control in same-sex couples, measuring coercive control, and children’s experience of coercive control. Coercive control is not a type of violence. Indeed, level of control predicts a range of negative outcomes heretofore associated with physical abuse, including post-separation violence and sexual assault; important differences in coercive control dynamics distinguish male homosexual from lesbian couples; measuring coercive control requires innovative ways of aggregating and categorizing data; and how children experience coercive control is a problem area that offers enormous promise for the years ahead.

From the perspective of prominent positions in both moral philosophy and legal scholarship, tort law can seem baffling: people are made to pay damages when they are barely or not at fault, yet some serious harms go uncompensated. Many of these puzzles grow out of the assumption that the law's concern must either be to compensate losses or penalize misconduct. In private wrongs, Arthur Ripstein provides a philosophical and systematic account of the rights protected by tort law. The law of tort protects what people already have: their person, understood as bodily integrity and reputation, and property. Ripstein articulates the form of these rights, and provides a simple but compelling explanation of the sense in which the point of damages is to make it as if the wrong had never happened. He explains why this matters even though damages are at best an imperfect substitute and why enforcing private rights is consistent with the other activities of a liberal state without being reducible to them.--Publisher's information.

By drawing on a range of theoretical traditions emerging from feminism, criminology, and sociology, Women and Gendered Violence in Canadasignificantly expands the conversation on violence against women.

For women seeking to extricate themselves from the web of entrapment woven together by the multiple threads that make up the coercive control repertoire of their abusive intimate partners, it is often difficult to avoid engagement with legal systems. Yet, the legal systems they encounter—criminal, family, child welfare, immigration among them—are frequently unwelcoming (if not hostile), controlling, demeaning, fragmented and contradictory. While there has been a recent explosion of interest in “access to justice,” little attention has been paid to how we might conceptualize access to justice in a manner that speaks meaningfully to the circumstances of women who experience abuse in their intimate relationships. For such women, access to justice is curtailed not only by lack of representation, delays, costs, and procedural complexities—the obstacles commonly associated with access to justice failings—but by three inter-related phenomena: the enduring hold of an incident-based understanding of domestic violence; the failure of legal actors to curb men’s strategic use of legal systems to further their power; and the host of complications—contradictory expectations, inconsistent orders, repetitious proceedings, sweeping surveillance—that arise when women are compelled to navigate multiple intersecting legal systems. What is required, I argue, is a conceptualization of access to justice that places women’s safety and well-being at its core.