Torts, Crimes and Vindication: Whose Wrong is it?

Abstract

It is sometimes said that tort law provides for the vindication of individual rights — which raises the question of how tort law as thus understood should relate to criminal law, which is sometimes also said to be concerned with the vindication of rights. I discuss the differences between civil and criminal modes of vindication; the ways in which we might nonetheless blur the boundaries between the tort process and the criminal process; and the light that this can throw on the central core of criminal law.