New Edition of Leading Tort Treatise Published

Photo of book coverFive members of the TLRG and one of their former colleagues have published Fridman’s The Law of Torts in Canada, fourth edition (2020). The book provides a comprehensive analysis of all facets of Canadian tort law. It is a detailed reference, containing both authoritative statements of the law and extensive references to the primary and secondary sources. The book is by a team of six highly-regarded tort law scholars: Andrew Botterell, Erika Chamberlain, Mitchell McInnes, Jason Neyers, Stephen Pitel, and Zoë Sinel. The two general editors (Chamberlain and Pitel) were responsible for the overall coordination of the book, review of all chapters, and the preparation of the common elements. The book was supported by the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Gerald Fridman, one of Canada’s most accomplished legal scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, wrote the first edition of this book in two volumes in 1989 and 1990. He wrote the second edition in 2002. For the third edition, in 2010, he collaborated with four of the current authors, but retained sole responsibility for more than half of the book. Fridman passed away in November 2017 at the age of 89. He was a friend and mentor to all of the authors and they are honoured to carry on what he began. They are also grateful to Janet Fridman, his spouse of nearly 60 years, for her support of this edition.

The fourth edition has been substantially revised. The revisions are the result not only of the rapid pace of change in tort law over the past decade, but also to the efforts of the new authors, who have modernized older content and added important new discussion. The book, nonetheless, retains many of the original references to key cases from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a hallmark of Fridman’s approach to the law. To look back at what these cases actually did and did not decide is not merely legal archaeology, but rather an invaluable process that can inspire fresh insight into the current state of Canadian tort law.

Highlights of the fourth edition include rewritten chapters on nuisance, passing off, and the unlawful means tort; extensively revised chapters on the foundations of tort liability, causation, defamation, invasion of privacy, and inducing breach of contract; additional analysis of the court’s approach to the duty of care in negligence; and new discussion of e-trespass, the shopkeeper’s privilege relating to trespass to the person, liability for injuries caused by police dogs, the powers associated with an occupier’s obligations, the remoteness rule for deceit, the scope of the tort of intimidation, and the “means and ends” understanding of intention for the economic torts.

The transformations created by the online world make a book of this nature more, not less, important. Access to tort law through the internet tends to take the form of considering the recent cases and using them as both starting and ending points for research. Any given case, however, even one that issues from the highest authority, often omits important nuances and details about the law. In contrast, using a treatise as the starting point for research takes advantage of its synthesis of thousands of decided cases and suggests many different directions for possible additional analysis.