Neyers Speaks at King's College London
Professor Neyers Speaks at King's College London
On December 14, 2012, Professor Jason Neyers presented a paper entitled, "The Moral Basis of Public Nuisance" at the Moral Values and Private Law conference hosted by King's College London. The conference featured speakers from Harvard, Oxford, University College London, Tel Aviv, William & Mary and DePaul, who delivered papers on the moral foundations of property law, estoppel, duty of care, unjust enrichment, gain-based damages, and civil recourse in private law. The thesis of Neyers's paper was that, in distinction to modern judicial thinking, the tort of public nuisance has a different moral foundation than the crime of the same name. This entails, therefore, that the scope of liability in tort is different than that found in the criminal law. The bulk of the lecture was devoted to dealing with the precise scope of the tort, for example, by examining whether damages for personal injuries and pure economic loss were recoverable and determining what meaning should be given to the concepts of "substantial, direct, and particular" damage that are seen to be the heart of the tort.
