The Next Revolution? Negligence Law for the 21st Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Donoghue’s neighbour is still the defining concept of Canadian tort law. Indeed, the whole history of modern negligence law can be reasonably understood as a concerted judicial effort to adapt and accommodate that principle to changing social, commercial and legal conditions. Now, 90 years later, it is perhaps time to recommend another revolution in negligence law. The Donoghue-inspired doctrine has done sterling work, but it is now weighed down with a bewildering range of conditions, clarifications and complications. When the duty analysis is complemented by other related requirements of causation and remoteness, the law of negligence has become something of a dog’s breakfast. This is compounded by the fact that tort law has become the poster-child for a general shift in law away from traditional legal reasoning to a more openly acknowledged policy analysis. This is no bad thing. But the problem is that there exist multi-dimensional and multi-located doctrinal occasions for such policy work. This does not lend itself to a doctrinal product that is either readily accessible or easily understandable. As such, the time is ripe for transforming, if not revolutionizing negligence law. This essay seeks to engage in such a transformative analysis and prescription.\nL’arrêt Donoghue établit toujours le concept déterminant du droit canadien de la responsabilité civile. En effet, toute l’histoire du droit moderne de la négligence peut être raisonnablement comprise comme un effort judiciaire concerté pour adapter et accommoder ce principe à l’évolution des conditions sociales, commerciales et juridiques. Aujourd’hui, 90 ans plus tard, il est peut-être temps de recommander une autre révolution dans le droit de la négligence. La doctrine inspirée de Donoghue a fait un travail remarquable, mais elle est aujourd’hui alourdie par une série déconcertante de conditions, de clarifications et de complications. Lorsque l’analyse de l’obligation est complétée par d’autres exigences connexes de causalité et d’éloignement, le droit de la négligence est devenu une sorte de « bouillie pour les chats ». Cette situation est aggravée par le fait que le droit de la responsabilité civile est devenu l’exemple type d’une évolution générale du droit, qui s’éloigne du raisonnement juridique traditionnel pour s’orienter vers une analyse politique plus ouvertement reconnue. Ce n’est pas une mauvaise chose. Mais le problème est qu’il existe des occasions doctrinales multidimensionnelles et multilocales pour un tel travail politique. Cela ne se prête pas à un produit doctrinal facilement accessible ou facilement compréhensible. Le moment est donc venu de transformer, voire de révolutionner le droit de la négligence. Cet article cherche à s’engager dans une telle analyse et prescription transformatrice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".