Justice Katherine van Rensburg Delivers Second Public Lecture of 2022/23
On March 13, 2023, the Honorable Justice Katherine van Rensburg of the Court of Appeal for Ontario delivered the Tort Law Research Group’s second public lecture of the 2022/23 academic year to an audience of students, practitioners, and faculty.
Justice van Rensburg was appointed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario in 2013. She had served on the Superior Court of Justice in the Central West Region since November 2006. She also served on the Divisional Court. Before her appointment to the bench, Justice van Rensburg practised civil litigation and environmental law, having been certified by the Law Society of Upper Canada as a specialist in each.
In her talk, “Reflections on Remedies, Rights, and Common Law Wrongs,” Justice van Rensburg argued that it was the search for an effective and meaningful remedy in individual cases that spurred development in the law of torts. She noted that within the common law of torts, courts have created new causes of action to respond to modern problems—for example, the tort of intrusion upon seclusion. Other times, rather than create a new tort, courts have provided tort victims with a better chance for a remedy by expanding existing tort doctrines. Claims by victims of institutional abuse, for example, have benefited from the recognition of systemic negligence and the expansion of the doctrine of vicarious liability. When a new tort cannot be created or an existing doctrine expanded, courts have founded remedies in statutory causes of action such as statutory claims relating to contaminated land in environmental law and secondary market misrepresentation in securities law.
While Justice van Rensburg championed the provision of these remedial avenues for deserving plaintiffs, she cautioned that sometimes this search for a remedy can lead to a wrong turn in the law and to doctrinal confusion. In this regard, she drew our attention to the claim of knowing assistance in breach of fiduciary duty.
The TLRG’s Public Lectures for the 2022-23 academic year were generously sponsored by Shillington McCall LLP.
