Neyers Featured Speaker in Singapore
(l-r) Joachim Dietrich, Robert Stevens, David Llewellyn, and Jason Neyers
From August 18-19, 2016 Professor Neyers was a featured speaker at the Protecting Business and Economic Interests: Contemporary Issues in Tort Law conference held at the Supreme Court of Singapore. The conference was jointly organised by the Centre for Cross-Border Commercial Law in Asia, Singapore Management University (School of Law), Bond University (Faculty of Law) and the Singapore Academy of Law. As its title suggests, the conference examined the role of tort law in protecting business and economic interests, with particular focus on the economic torts, defamation, privacy, breach of confidence, and accessory and vicarious liability. The conference included speakers from around the Commonwealth, with the keynote addresses given by The Right Honourable Lord Hoffmann, formerly Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and The Right Honourable Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
Professor Neyers’ presentation examined damage as the gist of the tort of deceit. He asked what right the tort of deceit protects and why the mental element of fraud remains important. He answered that the tort of deceit protects us from the dispossession of our rights and the requirement of fraud ensures that the purported transfer is not binding since the parties lack the necessary consensus ad idem. Thus, according to Neyers, the common law is correct in making damage the gist of the tort of deceit, so long as ‘damage’ is understood to be the dispossession of a right.
While in Singapore Professor Neyers also gave a Continuing Legal Education seminar to the Singaporean Bar entitled “The Modern of Tort of Public Nuisance”. The seminar was hosted by Singapore Management University (School of Law) and focused on recent developments in that tort.
