Rights-based justifications for the tort of unlawful interference with economic relations
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The tort of unlawful interference with economic relations is anomalous since it allows a plaintiff to sue a defendant for a loss that is occasioned by an unlawful act committed by that defendant against a third party. This parasitic liability is seemingly in violation of the basic tort law principle that in order to make out a claim what the plaintiff must show is a violation of her own rights, not merely a wrong to someone else. Thus, it appears that the tort is an instance of damnum absque injuria. This paper examines whether this is in fact the case by examining if there are any rights-based theories that can explain the tort in a way that is consistent with basic private law principle. In other words, is it possible to find an independent right of the defendant that has somehow been violated, one which explains why the defendant is able to sue in their own right? Upon examination, it appears that the ‘right to trade’, ‘remoteness’ and ‘abuse of right’ theories are largely incapable of providing such an explanation since they display many seemingly insurmountable problems of coherence and fit with the existing case-law. More promising are the arguments that the tort is a justified exception to basic principle or that it is an example of public rights being vindicated in private law, yet each of these theories is also problematic in some respects. The overall thesis of the paper is that the tort of unlawful interference with economic relations is radically under-theorised and that it, and the other economic torts, could benefit tremendously from more intense academic examination.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it