"The harshness and injustice of the common law rule...has frequenly been commented upon": DebatingContributory Negligence in Canada, 1914-1949

In early twentieth century many legal professionals damned law of contributory negligence as complicated and unfair to plaintiffs barred from recovery while business people often complained that judges and juries refused to find sympathetic plaintiffs contributorily negligent. Elite Canadian lawyers, through their work in Canadian Bar Association and Commission on Uniformity of Legislation in Canada, proposed model contributory negligence legislation that number of provinces subsequently adopted. Reviews of these statutes were mixed however. The large body of existing case law, despite its complications, encouraged some lawyers and judges to fall back on older jurisprudence in interpreting new acts. Legislators and law reformers responded by increasing length and complexity of negligence statutes, thus undermining goal of simplifying law.Au debut du vingtieme siecle, les specialistes du droit ont ete nombreux condamner la regle relative la negligence de la victime comme etant compliquee et injuste pour les demandeurs prives d'un recours alors que les gens d'affaires se plaignaient souvent du fait que juges et jurys refusaient de declarer que des demandeurs sympathiques etaient eux-memes responsables de negligence. Des avocats canadiens de renom, dans leurs travaux au sein de l'Association du Barreau canadien et de la Conference sur l'uniformisation des lois au Canada, ont propose un modele de loi en cette matiere qui par la suite ete adopte par bon nombre de provinces. Les opinions sur ces lois etaient toutefois partagees. La jurisprudence considerable, malgre ses complications, encourage certains avocats et certains juges s'appuyer sur des precedents anciens pour interpreter les nouvelles lois. Les legislateurs et les reformateurs du droit ont alors reagi en allongeant les lois sur la negligence et en les rendant plus complexes, ce qui mine l'objectif qui etait de simplifier le droit.IntroductionI. Contributory negligence before Great WarII. The critique of contributory negligenceIII. Provincial legislationIV. Judicial interpretationV. Statutory amendments ConclusionIntroductionThis article explores debates over, and legislation concerning, law doctrine of contributory negligence in Canada from Great War to abolition of new appeals from Canada to Judicial Committee of Privy Council in 1949. Canadian legal historians have given scant attention to law for period after 1915. The lack of interest in law is both understandable and lamentable. The focus on period before 1915 stems in part from tendency of Canadian scholars to follow American academic trends in this area. Morton Horwitz's 1977 work The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 proved especially influential. He argued that American judges reshaped common law in nineteenth century to encourage capitalist development. Using an instrumentalist approach, judiciary deviated from American and British precedents in several areas of law, including tort, to ensure that disproportionate share of wealth produced by industrial economy remained with upper echelons of American society. During eighty years after American Revolution, Horwitz concluded, a major transformation of legal system took place. The result was that emergent entrepreneurial and commercial groups won a disproportionate share of wealth and power in American society.1Horwitz's thesis spurred imitators and critics. Critics included Gary T. Schwartz and Peter Karsten. Schwartz counters argument that American courts assisted business interests in cases, suggesting that the nineteenth-century negligence system was applied with impressive sternness to major industries and that tort law exhibited keen concern for victim welfare.2 Karsten similarly suggests that judiciary did not contort decisions to support propertied and powerful. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.