After presenting papers at the Fifth Biennial Conference on the Law of Obligations, held at the University of Oxford this past month, Western Law professors Erika Chamberlain and Jason Neyers, along with professor Stephen Pitel, will start preparing for Western to host the event in 2012.
This year’s conference was attended by over 160 scholars and judges from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
Neyers’ paper, “Abuse of Rights in the Common Law?” argued that several seemingly anomalous common law doctrines can be synthesized by the doctrine of abuse of right, while Chamberlain’s paper, “Misfeasance in a Public Office: A Justifiable Anomaly to the Rights-Based Approach?” explored whether the misfeasance tort is consistent with the rights-based approach to tort law, or could otherwise be justified in light of its compensatory, vindicatory and deterrent functions.
Both projects are part of research the two professors are doing under three-year Standard Research Grants from SSHRC.
The Obligations series of conferences originated at the University of Melbourne in 2002, and has since become one of the leading private law conferences in the common law world. The conferences have been held at the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, and the National University of Singapore.