Neyers Presents at Obligations IX in Australia
On July 17-20, Professor Neyers attended the Ninth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations (Obligations IX): Form and Substance in the Law of Obligations, held at the University of Melbourne. The Obligations conferences bring together scholars, judges, and practitioners from throughout the common law world to discuss current issues in contract, torts, equity, and unjust enrichment. The series originated at the University of Melbourne in 2002 and has become a significant international forum for discussion between scholars and practitioners in the field.
In his paper, “Form and Substance in the Tort of Deceit,” Professor Neyers argued that, contrary to appearances, the tort of deceit is not a tort that is premised on the suffering of loss by claimants. Instead, it is a tort that protects claimants from being dispossessed of rights that they are entitled to already, whether or not this dispossession actually leads to any pecuniary loss. He examined four leading English Court of Appeal decisions that are difficult to explain from the loss-based view of deceit and demonstrated that they are all easily explainable in terms of rights dispossessions. Moreover, he argued that the rights-based view of the tort does not suffer from the conceptual impossibility or coherence concerns that plague the loss-based view.
This paper forms part of a larger research project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, that Professor Neyers is pursuing with Professor Andrew Botterell, who is an Associate Professor of Law and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Western University.
