Relationships

• Author: Philip H. Osborne
• Pages: 453-467

453

CHAPTER 8

R EL AT IONSHIPS

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 per-

sons to one another and to private and public institutions. The conven-

tional 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 res ponsibility. At the margin s they tend to shade the

one into the other, each using similar concepts to resolve conf‌licts that

arise between litigants. In this chapter the reader is alerted in a sum-

mary way to some of the relationa l issues arising in the f‌ield of tort law

and the general principles that bear on those issues. In particular, con-

sideration is given to the private law regimes of contract law, f‌iduciary

law, the law of restitution, and the action for breach of conf‌idence and

the public law constitutional 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