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When pandemic constraints are imposed, some people will suffer losses, people who might not otherwise have done so. The economic losses of facilities that are used in pandemic emergencies have been addressed by other chapters; this chapter considers losses faced by individuals who are required to stay at home to avoid disease transmission. It argues that the costs they bear result from social choices that are aimed to benefit everyone by reducing the risks of disease transmission. In such cases, reciprocity requires compensation to the extent possible, for losses such as wages, exacerbation of disease conditions, or exposure to the risks of disease from activities such as home care for ill family members who cannot be accommodated in overwhelmed health care facilities.

Loss which is consequential upon the infringement of a right is recoverable, loss which is not so consequent is irrecoverable. If you experience economic loss as a result of intentional or negligent actions, the economic loss consequential upon the right violated are prima facie recoverable. Within the law of negligence there is no ‘exclusionary rule’ barring the recovery of ‘pure economic loss’. Precisely the same pattern is found where the loss takes other forms. So, lost chances, emotional distress, and physical discomfort are recoverable where suffered as a result of the infringement of a right unless too remote. Psychiatric illness, commonly if misleadingly considered under the label nervous shock, is quite different as it has long been established that there is a free-standing right not to be so injured.

This chapter explains how abusive boilerplate could either be treated as a defective product, or else regulated under a new tort of intentional deprivation of basic legal rights. It argues that we should put boilerplate rights deletion schemes into the legal category—tort law—in which we can actually consider them as products, instead of considering them one at a time as a contract between two individuals. It also highlights boundary the fuzzy and shifting boundary between contracts and torts by focusing on doctrinal border areas such as fraud or misrepresentation, bad faith breach of contract, and warranty. A case study involving implied warranty of habitability in residential leases is presented. The chapter concludes with a comparison of tort and contract remedies, along with the common-law economic loss doctrine.

Canada approved GM canola for unconfined release in 1995, but it did so without open and informed debate about the problems of coexistence of GM and non-GM agriculture, and without a regulatory structure to adequate addressing them. They are, therefore, being dealt with by the courts. This chapter first discusses what this entails for affected farmers in the well-known cases of Monsanto v Schmeiser and Hoffman v Monsanto. It then explores the possibility of bringing an action against the government for negligence in regulating and controlling GM technology, particularly in failing to provide adequately for the coexistence of GM and non-GM agriculture. Several class actions relating to BSE currently before the Canadian courts are presented as examples.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of economic insecurity. Economic insecurity can be defined as “the risk of economic loss faced by workers and households as they encounter the unpredictable events of life.” Insecurity is associated with income loss caused by “adverse events” such as unemployment and poor health; the negative impact of these shocks on households depends “on the surrounding institutions that regulate risk.” Indeed, the extent to which workers suffered financial distress from income shocks depended in large part on the social safety net—the existing institutions of public and private assistance. For nineteenth-century England and Wales, the main social welfare institution was the Poor Law, a system of public relief administered and financed at the local level. The Old Poor Law of 1795–1834 was “a welfare state in miniature,” relieving the elderly, widows, children, the sick, the disabled, and the unemployed and underemployed.

This chapter focuses on the so-called exclusionary rule and the basis for excluding liability for economic loss in tort law. It examines five different situations into which economic loss cases can be divided. The first ‘exclusionary’ situation is typified by circumstances where the defendant damages something in which the plaintiff may have a contractual interest (or something else that is less than a possessory or proprietary right) and this impairs the plaintiff’s interest, causing him financial loss. The two other ‘non-exclusionary’ situations are where the plaintiff’s financial loss arises through a special relationship of justified detrimental reliance by the plaintiff on the defendant, and where it results from the defendant’s intentional interference with the plaintiff’s contract with a third party.

This chapter discusses the rights and interests protected by tort law. It is organized as follows. Section B considers the protection of the person, particularly his life, physical integrity, mental and physical health, and his personality rights, as well as on the disputed issues of wrongful conception and wrongful life. Section C deals with protection of property, both movable and immovable. Finally, Section D analyzes the protection of economic interests, focusing on the problem of pure economic loss and particularly its lower level of protection.

This chapter examines the expressive and material importance of damages, with particular emphasis on how race and gender have affected the amount of damages awarded to plaintiffs in personal injury cases. There are two categories of tort damages: compensatory damages and punitive damages. Compensatory damages are often awarded and are considered the “normal” remedy in tort cases. To accomplish the restorative function of tort law to the widest extent possible, compensatory damages are awarded to cover a wide variety of losses, including economic damages and noneconomic harms. This chapter comments on the use of race-based and gender-based tables and statistics to compute loss of future earning capacity, arguing that such estimations are neither accurate nor equitable. It explains how women and racial minorities have been affected by legislative caps on noneconomic damages for pain and suffering and other intangible losses. It contends that non-economic losses should be treated on a par with economic losses.

The story of the development of the Aquilian action in the 20th century is largely one of the struggle to free the action from outdated confines, by extending it to conduct and harm of all kinds. More particularly, it is the story of the development of liability for omissions, for negligent misstatements, and for pure economic loss. These developments have been made possible, or at any rate facilitated, by the resurrection and redefinition of the element of wrongfulness, which has come to serve a very prominent role as a discretionary tool for judicial control in expanding the frontiers of Aquilian liability. This chapter focuses on these major developments, with liability for misstatements being treated as an aspect of the wider problem of liability for negligently inflicted pure economic loss.

Overall and insured losses of natural disasters are steadily increasing and reach record highs. The worldwide insurance and reinsurance industry plays an important role to provide immediate financial support to overcome the impact of natural disasters. This chapter provides information about the development of insurance solutions for natural disasters - from a historical perspective up to current insurance schemes, including micro-insurance. It also analyses in detail the impact of natural disasters of the last decades and points out the most affected areas, the costliest and deadliest events, the distribution by peril and the impact in different income groups.

Discussions of causation are much less prominent in books about contract than in books about tort. The reason for this is probably the following. In the first place, the harm for which compensation is to be paid in the law of contract is usually economic rather than physical, and establishing ‘causal connection’ between a breach of contract and economic loss. Second, the causal or near-causal problems which arise in actions for breach of contract are often relatively simple in comparison with the difficulty of determining the scope of the duty to pay damages, so that attention has been concentrated on the latter, but often in a terminology which straddles both issues and so makes it difficult to see what type of limitation on liability is being discussed. Third, liability in contract is more often based on the notion of risk than in tort.

This chapter examines the expressive and material importance of damages, with particular emphasis on how race and gender have affected the amount of damages awarded to plaintiffs in personal injury cases. There are two categories of tort damages: compensatory damages and punitive damages. Compensatory damages are often awarded and are considered the “normal” remedy in tort cases. To accomplish the restorative function of tort law to the widest extent possible, compensatory damages are awarded to cover a wide variety of losses, including economic damages and noneconomic harms. This chapter comments on the use of race-based and gender-based tables and statistics to compute loss of future earning capacity, arguing that such estimations are neither accurate nor equitable. It explains how women and racial minorities have been affected by legislative caps on noneconomic damages for pain and suffering and other intangible losses. It contends that non-economic losses should be treated on a par with economic losses.

Chapter 2 identifies a significant principle, immanent in tort law, vindicating the value in cooperative human arrangements. ‘Tort’s cooperation principle’ illuminates the necessity, at the duty of care stage in negligence claims, of analysing the prior dealings of the relevant parties. In claims between participants to a commercial arrangement, tort’s support for cooperation manifests in a preference for protecting the security of the coming together of the parties by refusing to recognise entitlements that would circumvent the arrangement. The common judicial assessment that society and the market expect commercial parties to be economically self-reliant exposes the importance of interrogating the reasonableness of commercial claimants’ reliance, for their own economic protection, on fellow participants in a commercial arrangement. This perspective reveals a long-standing doctrinal discontinuity and calls into question the reasoning used to support the Hedley Byrne & Co. Ltd. v. Heller & Partners Ltd. line of authority in commercial disputes.

This chapter examines the increase in catastrophic losses in the United States and how various stakeholders, given their different positions and, in some cases, different interests, can manage the associated risks and costs. It presents statistics showing that there has been a pronounced increase in economic losses resulting from natural disasters, including hurricanes, since 1990. In addition, property values at risk in hazard-prone areas in the United States have risen considerably in recent years. Although the impact of climate change on these increased losses is not clear, there is growing concern that global warming might trigger much stronger hurricanes hitting the coast over a shorter period of time and increased damage to property. Aside from insurers and reinsurers, natural disasters involve many interested parties such as homeowners, banks and other financial institutions, the real estate community, the construction industry and developers, the capital markets, and government.

This book is concerned with economic harm which is not connected with and not consequent upon any harm to the claimant's body or property as actual physical things. This lecture argues first, contrary to the view of the House of Lords, that while it is certainly tortious to get a person deliberately to break his contract with a person one is aiming at — for example, by suborning his agents — there is no further tort of interference with people's contracts. Second, contrary to the views of most writers, the lecture argues that while it is certainly tortious to cause deliberate economic harm by wrongful means, the requirement that the means be wrongful is entirely correct, sensible, and practical. Third, it holds that inducing breach of contract is simply an instance of the tort just mentioned and has no significantly divergent features or rules.

Illegal and destructive trade of archaeological heritage is a well-documented phenomenon as described in this chapter. It leads to economic loss and cultural dislocation for the dispossessed communities and countries. Recent research has showed the economic value of archaeological heritage and has also emphasized stakeholders' growing interests in it. Cultural tourism also sometimes exploits the economic value of archaeological heritage. The chapter investigates the economic value of archaeological heritage and also makes some suggestions to utilize the value for improving the present protective regime.

This chapter provides an overview of Hurricane Katrina, the flooding of New Orleans and their impact on the scope of rebuilding that New Orleans faced. First, it summarizes the the evolution of Hurricane Katrina, its arrival on the Louisiana coast and the sequence of events and failures that resulted in the city’s flooding. A second section covers key aspects of the disorganized and slow government responses that followed the flooding and resulting human tragedy. In the third section, the scale of the destruction to New Orleans is detailed to show the enormous rebuilding challenge and the resulting uncertainty about the city’s future. The chapter concludes with a brief synopsis of existing research on New Orleans’ post-Katrina recovery and the book’s contribution to this research through deepening understanding of the grassroots rebuilding process at the neighborhood scale.

This chapter considers the flip side of the case on free trade, in which trade interventions are often misguided and costly. It analyzes tariffs and quotas on imports that inefficiently redistribute income from consumers to producers. It points out how trade barriers produce a net economic loss due to the costs of consumers exceeding the benefits to producers and reduce exports that harm downstream user industries. The chapter also addresses the question of why trade protectionism is often politically attractive. It examines situations in which protection may be justified in theory, even if governments might be ineffective in trying to take advantage of those situations.

This chapter is concerned with miscellaneous actions on the case for causing economic loss, particularly in the context of monopolies. An action for drawing customers away from a market was allowed in 1310, and other monopolies were recognized under manorial customs, but a monopoly could not be acquired simply by being the first to use a trade in a particular place. A novel action of 1584 for infringing a trademark included elements of deceit and defamation, but there was as yet no concept of intellectual property. Monopolies granted by patent received a blow from a leading decision of 1602 concerning playing-cards. New kinds of economic tort were recognized in actions for intimidation (1621) and malicious injury in trade (1707), raising possibilities to be exploited in much later periods.