Neyers Presents at Punishment and Private Law Workshop in Singapore

Prof. Jason Neyers

Prof. Katy Barnett, Melbourne Law School and Prof. Jason Neyers, Western Law

On 16-18 December 2019, Professor Neyers attended Punishment and Private Law, an invitation-only workshop co-sponsored by the National University of Singapore (NUS), Melbourne Law School, and the University of Oxford. The workshop was hosted by NUS Law at their Bukit Timah. The purpose of the event was to look critically at deep‐seated ideas about the purpose of punishment in private law and to examine how private law may further punitive objectives. The workshop included speakers from a range of jurisdictions who work at the interface between private law and regulation.

In his presentation, Professor Neyers argued that although it is commonly assumed that the damage assessment rules in the tort of deceit are punitive in nature because they are so different from those at work in the tort of negligence, this is a fundamentally misguided view of the law. Instead, he argued that the different damage assessment principles reflect that deceit, which protects people from being non-consensually dispossessed of their entitlements, is a very different wrong than negligence, which protects people from damage occasioned by the defendant’s imposition of an unreasonable risk of injury. Given this important difference, he noted that it would indeed be strange if there were not some dissimilarities between the two torts in relation to the assessment of damages.

Professor Neyers’ presentation and the publication that will result form part of a larger research project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, that he is pursuing with Professor Andrew Botterell, Western Law's Associate Dean (Research & Graduate Studies) and Associate Professor in Law and Philosophy at Western University.