Purpose Of Tort Law

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Tort can be described as the area of civil law which provide a remedy for a party who has suffered the breach of a protected interest. The word itself is derived from the Latin ‘tortum’, meaning twisted or wrong. A wide scope of interest is protected by the law of tort. Currently, the tort which is the greatest source of litigation is that of negligence. Negligence concerns personal safety and interests in property, as well as the person while ownership of property is governed by trespass to property. Other kinds of property interests are the domain of the torts of nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher. Remedies for threats to one’s reputation are provided by the tort of defamation. Purposes of tort law:(1) to provide a peaceful means for adjusting…show more content…
Lord Tucker described crime as ‘an offence against the public…liable to legal punishment’. Where a crime has been committed the wrongdoer is liable for punishment. A criminal prosecution may proceed although the victim has been fully compensated. The criminal law normally requires an element of moral fault on the part of offender. Thus, the prosecution must establish two essential requirements actus reus (prohibited act) and mens rea (intention). These elements must be fulfilled to create criminal liability. Whereas, mens rea has been exempted from requirements in some statutory offences. The offender is liable for the wrongful act alone. These are known as crimes of strict liability. For instance, selling food for human consumption which fails to comply with food safety requirements contrary to the Food Safety Act 1990. The purpose of criminal law :1)the enforcement of compulsory…show more content…
Criminal law does not. Specifically, criminal law punishes not only: (a) Acts that are harmful to others, but also: (b) Acts that are harmful only or mainly to the actor being punished; (c) Dangerous acts that have not yet caused harm; and (d) Acts that the community considers immoral, even if the acts are not "harmful" in the narrower sense of the term. By contrast, tort law mainly provides a remedy for harmful acts, not for acts that create risks of future harm, and not for acts that are considered immoral but not harmful.4 (3) Criminal law often imposes much more severe sanctions than tort law, of course: loss of liberty or even of life. So the procedural protections in criminal law obviously are much more extensive and (in theory at least) a much greater barrier to liability. For example, the criminal defendant, unlike the tort defendant, must be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the exclusionary rule sometimes applies, and the double-jeopardy rule precludes the same jurisdiction from pursuing multiple convictions for the same conduct.5 (4) Criminal law, in theory at least, contains a

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