Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
-
ItemCorporate Culture and Systems Intentionality: part of the regulator's essential toolkit(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-07-03)
-
ItemPunitive Damages and the Place of Punishment in Private Law(Wiley, 2021-11-01)Abstract It has long been orthodoxy that punitive damages, because they are awarded in order to punish, are an anomalous remedy. So entrenched is this understanding that it has never been seriously challenged. However, even apparent truisms about the law should be questioned and, accordingly, this article offers a rival account. It contends that the deeply ingrained view that punitive damages are an aberration is a half‐truth because several other remedial rules are also aimed, at least in certain circumstances, at punishment. We concentrate in this regard on the doctrine of remoteness and its attenuation where the defendant has intentionally injured the claimant, aggravated damages, the account of profits remedy and general damages. Overthrowing the orthodox understanding regarding punitive damages has important prescriptive implications. In particular, it follows that the belief that punitive damages are an alien presence in private law supplies no basis for confining the jurisdiction to award them.
-
ItemEvolution and Revolution: The Remedial Smorgasbord for Misleading Conduct in Australia(Florida International University, 2020)In Australia, the revolutionary Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) introduced, in section 52, a simple and powerful prohibition on conduct in trade or commerce that is “misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive.” The prohibition applies to business-to-business transactions as well as to those involving consumers and contains no requirement of fault on the part of the contravenor. Its purposes are explicitly instrumental: to protect consumers and promote fair business practices. The Act also introduced a veritable ‘smorgasbord’ of remedies for victims of misleading conduct that were equally revolutionary, granting to courts a wide-ranging remedial discretion to award relief that includes, for example, the power to vary contracts retroactively.
-
ItemA Road Map to Decision Causation in Misleading Conduct and Failure to Disclose Cases(Australian Lawyers Alliance Ltd, 2020)Statutory concepts of causation have been front and centre in a series of recent Federal Court and Supreme Court decisions addressing cases of misleading conduct. The statutes all provide compensatory remedies for loss or damage suffered ‘because of’, ‘by’ or ‘as a result of’ misleading conduct. A particularly difficult question is how a failure to disclose some fact or matter can cause a person to suffer loss or damage. How can a person rely on something that was not said?