Private Law in the 21st Century Hart Studies in Private Law Series

This book brings together a wide range of contributors from across the common law world to identify and debate the principal moral and systemic challenges facing private law in the remaining part of the twenty-first century.

The various contributions identify serious problems relating to complexity and overload, threats to research and education, the law's unintelligibility, the unsatisfactory nature of the law reform process and a general lack of public engagement.

They consider the respective future roles of statutes, codes, and judge-made law (in the form of both common law and equitable rules). They consider how best to organise the private law system internally, and how to co-ordinate it externally with other public and economic systems (human rights, regulation, insurance markets and social security frameworks). They address the challenges for private law presented by new forms of technology, and by modern demands for the protection of new and intangible forms of moral interest, such as interests in privacy, 'vindication' and 'personal choice'.

They also engage with the critical contemporary debates about access to, and the privatisation of, civil justice. The work is designed as a source of inspiration and reference for private lawyers, as well as legislators, policy-makers and students.

Part I: Agendas and Predictions
. 1. Private Law as a Complex System: Agendas for the Twenty-First Century
. 2. Challenges for Private Law in the Twenty-First Century
. 3. Rationalising Tort Law for the Twenty-First Century
. 4. The Challenges of Private Law: A Research Agenda for an Autonomy-Based Private Law
. 5. 'The Steaming Lungs of a Pigeon': Predicting the Direction of Australian Contract Law in the Next 25 Years

Part II: Legislation, Codifi cation and the Role of the Common Law
. 6. Codification of Private Law: Scots Law at the Crossroads of Common and Civil law
. 7. Power Failure? The Distracting Effect of Legislation on Common Law Torts
. 8. Constructive Trusteeship: The Perils of Statutory Formulae

Part III: Complex Systems and Interactions
. 9. Fusing the Equitable Function in Private Law
. 10. Dealing with Complexity: Different Approaches to Explaining Accessory Liability
. 11. The Challenges Presented by Fundamental Rights to Private Law
. 12. The Limits of Technocracy: Private Law's Future in the Regulatory State
. 13. Common Law and the Constraint of Financial Markets: Credit Rating Agencies as a Test Case
. 14. Apologies as 'Canaries'-Tortious Liability in Negligence and Insurance in the Twenty-First Century
. 15. When Lump Sums Run Out: Disputes at the Borderlines of Tort Law, Injury Compensation and Social Security

Part IV: New Remedies, Technologies and Intangible Interests
. 16. 'I'll Perform If and When You Do': Non-Performance and the Suspension of Contractual Duties
. 17. Vindicatory Damages
. 18. Persuasive Technologies: From Loss of Privacy to Loss of Autonomy
. 19. Snooping: How Should Damages be Assessed for Harmless Breaches of Privacy?
. 20. Compensating Injury to Autonomy: A Conceptual and Normative Analysis
. 21. Matter over Mind: Tort Law's Treatment of Emotional Injury
. 22. The Interaction Between Defamation and Privacy
. 23. Making Amends by Apologising for Defamatory Publications: Developments in the Twenty-First Century

Part V: Process Challenges and the Privatisation of Justice
. 24. Tort and Neo-liberalism
. 25. Reforming Australian Litigation Lawyers: Educational Impacts of Civil Procedural Laws and Judicial Activism
. 26. Private Law in the Age of the 'Vanishing Trial'

Kit Barker is Professor of Law at the TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

Karen Fairweather is Associate Lecturer in Law at the TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

Ross Grantham is Professor of Law at the TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland