Faculty Colloquium with Samuel Beswick - The Cause of Action in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia

The Cause of Action in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia

Appeals in civil litigation are usually brought by the losing party: the party who did not obtain the outcome they sought. In this respect, the appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia might seem unusual. The appeal is being brought by a plaintiff who ostensibly won her tort claim in the courts below.

Maitland considered that the great benefit of the common law having abandoned the forms of action was to free litigants and courts to attend “to the real problem of what are the rights between man and man, what is the substantive law.” That problem squarely arises in Ahluwalia. The case is not simply about compensation for loss, holding a wrongdoer accountable, or correcting an injustice between two people. It is about the vindication of private rights. The question for the Court is whether vindication at common law lies in the imposition of civil liability and redress for a proven cause of action, or in the specific denotation of a civil wrong as a nominate tort.

Paper Slides

Speaker

Samuel Beswick is a private law scholar with primary research interests in the areas of torts, unjust enrichment, limitations, and remedies. His current research concerns the temporal scope of judicial changes in the law, as well as the rule of law in public authority civil liability. Dr. Beswick has published his research in leading common law journals, and has presented at workshops and conferences across North America and in the United Kingdom. He is the editor of the open-access casebook, Tort Law: Cases and Commentaries (2021 CanLIIDocs 1859). He has held teaching positions at Harvard Law School, King’s College London, and the University of Auckland.