The Power & Limits of Private Law

This book is third in The Canadian Law of Obligations series:
Common and Civil Law: Different Paths or Convergence? (2025)
The Power & Limits of Private Law (2024)
The Canadian Law of Obligations: Access to Justice (2020)
The Canadian Law of Obligations: Private Law for the 21st Century and Beyond (2018)

This collection of legal essays draws upon the third Canadian Law of Obligations conference held in June 2022 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Power & Limits of Private Law features scholarship of distinguished and emerging scholars from Canada and around the world. The contributions explore and critique the power and limits of the laws of torts/delict, contract and restitution through a range of theoretical, technical, policy-oriented and pragmatic perspectives. They grapple with contemporary issues and developments in Canadian law and society, advancing insights to shape both the theory and the practice of private law.

The Collection of Papers

1. Angela Swan – A Solicitor Looks at the Law of Contracts
2. Nathalie Vézina – Of Power and Limits: Bargaining Power and the Limits of Private Law Regarding Non-Liability Clauses
3. Mitchell McInnes – COVID-19 and the Limits of Contractual Frustration
4. Luigi Buonanno – Models of Joint and Several Liability: Eadem causa obligandi and Responsibility for Another’s Debt in Common Law and Civil Law Traditions
5. Sofia Santinello – Fiduciary Obligations in the Expanding World of Data Trusts
6. Alan Hanna & Emmaline English – Can a Moose Be a Party to a Contract? Nuanced Spaces for Indigenous Perspectives in Canadian Contract Law
7. Lachlan Deyong – Structural Barriers to Deterring Medical Harm in Canadian Medical Malpractice
8. Stephen Waddams – Legal Change and the Temptation of Elegance
9. John D. McCamus – Keeping Taxonomy in its Place: Recent Canadian Experience with Unjust Enrichment
10. Desmond Ryan – The Power and Limits of Close Connection: Assessing the Legacy of Bazley v. Curry Through Three International Case Studies
11. Aaron Yoong, Louis Lau Yi Hang & Chang Wen Yee – Vicarious Liability: Policy, Rationales and its Limits
12. Bogna Kaczorowska – The Regulatory Relevance and Legitimacy of Contract Law in Juxtaposition to Private Ordering
13. Samuel Beswick & Maddison Zapach – The Open Casebook Revolution
14. Stéphane Sérafin & Kerry Sun – Corrective Justice and In Personam Rights: Reconsidering the Tort of Inducing Breach of Contract
15. Margaret Isabel Hall – Beyond the King’s Peace: Direct Interferences With the Person as Tortious Interferences with Autonomy
16. Lionel Smith – Confusion, Illusion or Delusion: The Irreducible Core of the Common Law Trust

Who Should Read This Book

• Civil Litigators – assists in developing new perspectives on private law issues, developing innovative civil litigation strategies and formulating corresponding arguments
• Corporate/Commercial Lawyers – provides new perspectives on contract law issues
• Judges – provides new perspectives on the application of private law to modern legal issues, which judges are front and center in endorsing
• Academia – assists research in the areas discussed, provides a source of course readings and basis for class discussion
• Law Libraries – a useful reference for anyone researching in the area of torts and contracts

The Power & Limits of Private Law is a collection of papers developed out of the Supreme Court Law Review, Third Series.