Understanding Illegal Tort Claims: Comparative Legal Reasoning in Global Perspective

This project is funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grant and will run from 1 April 2023 to 31 May 2025.

This project seeks to develop new insights, concepts and techniques to respond to tort claims based on illegal conduct. It is the first comparative study on this difficult area, which has remained unsolved by numerous decisions of the highest courts in the common law world. The project brings together leading scholars in the field in a coherent and collaborative way. The applicant has extensive experience designing and running such projects, as well as a rare specialism in both the areas of law relevant to such actions, tort law and criminal law. The key research question is how, if at all, legal systems consider the illegality behind a tort claim to be relevant to liability. Underneath that are questions about particular fact patterns, about justifications for tort liability, and about what coherence or unity exists across a legal system.

The workshop was held in Oxford from 1 to 3 February 2024, with collaborators from Argentina, Brazil, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, South Africa, Australia, and remotely, Singapore. Over two days the participants discussed the theoretical and practical aspects of when a claim in tort might be, and should be, affected by the illegal conduct of the claimant. Based on the greater understanding of each other's systems, and one's own, the authors are working on the final versions for later in 2024.