Book review: Vicarious Liability: Critique and Reform (Hart Studies in Private Law)

Abstract

The doctrine of vicarious liability may be found across the common law world, rendering, in its most typical form, an employer strictly liable for the torts of its employees provided they take place in the course of employment. This formula, as is often the case in law, is easier to state than apply. In recent years, common law jurisdictions have come to re-examine this legal framework, leading to significant expansions of liability in jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and Canada. To a certain extent, such growth has been triggered by claims against institutional defendants arising from revelations of sexual abuse of minors by paedophiles working for these organisations, but it has also been due to changes in working practices and the willingness of the courts to embrace ideas such as loss distribution and enterprise liability. Changes in the law have challenged the assumption that tort law is now dominated by ideas of fault-based liability and of corrective justice, that is, that tort law intervention can only be justified when it seeks to render parties liable for those they wrongfully harm. As Lord Nicholls famously commented in Majrowski v Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust [2006] UKHL 34, [8]: