Relationships

• Author: Philip H. Osborne
• Profession: Faculty of Law. The University of Manitoba
• Pages: 409-421

409

CHAPTER 8

RELATIONSHIPS

A.INTRODUCTION

Tort law does not operate in a legal vacuum. There are other important

areas of private and public law which control the relationship of persons

to one another and to private and public institutions. The conventional

divisions and classif‌ications of the legal system inevitably give rise to

interrelationships and overlap between discrete areas of the law which

need to be resolved. These diff‌iculties are exacerbated by the fact that

there are often no sharp and distinct boundaries between the various

regimes of responsibility. At the margins they tend to shade the one into

the other, each using similar concepts to resolve conf‌licts that arise be-

tween litigants. In this chapter the reader is alerted in a summary way to

some of the relational issues a rising in the f‌ield of tort law and the general

principles that bear on those issues. In particular, consideration is given

to the private law regime s of contract law, f‌iduciar y law, the law of restitu-

tion, and the action for breach of conf‌idence and the public law constitu-

tional principles found in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

B. PRIVATE LAW

Many civil obligations arise from the relationships between people.

Tortious obligations of reasonable care arise from the relationships of