Wrongful actions by two or more persons may affect a plaintiff at the same time. Where each wrongdoer causes separate harm to the plaintiff, there are generally separate causes of action without any connection between them. Satisfaction by one wrongdoer does not discharge the other wrongdoers, and the plaintiff cannot generally join the wrongdoers as co-defendants. An exception exists where the wrongdoers act in concert, in which case they are joint wrongdoers, rendering each of them liable (at common law) for the total damage caused by all of them. Thus, where A and B simultaneously trespass on C’s land, each of A and B causing separate damage, the liability regime depends upon whether A and B are acting in concert.

Every civil wrong has a number of requirements that must be satisfied before the plaintiff may obtain compensation for resulting harm. One requirement common to all wrongs is that the harm must be attributable to the defendant’s wrongful conduct. It may broadly be said that the defendant’s wrongful conduct must constitute a cause of the harm. This always involves an inquiry into whether there is a historical link in fact between the wrong and the harm, and usually also a value judgement on whether liability for the harm ought to be imposed upon the defendant.

With regard to wrongs actionable only on proof of damage (for example, negligence), the attribution of responsibility for harm is part of establishing liability rather than a matter of remedy. With regard to wrongs actionable per se, the attribution of responsibility for harm is a matter of remedy since nominal damages can be awarded in the absence of loss. In any event, it is customary to discuss attribution of responsibility in books on remedies, and this book follows that custom.

In this chapter, we consider other forms of remedies which seek to vindicate the plaintiff’s rights by a public statement of those rights, including declarations and awards of nominal damages and apologies. The court may make a public statement of rights (as with declarations) or the defendant himself may be compelled to make the statement (as with apology orders). We first consider apologies, then declarations, nominal damages and contemptuous damages, and then finally other vindicatory awards available under the Australian Consumer Law.

The responsibilitiesand liability of the persons and organisations involved in the development of AI systems are not clearly identified. The assignment of liability will need government to mo e from a risk-based to a responsibility-based system. One possible approach would be to establish a pan-EU compensation fund for damages caused by digital technologies and AI, financed by the industry and insurance companies.

As technological improvements advance, the use of remote monitoring is among the new diagnostic tools that have become a growing part of medical care delivery. But reliance on technologies also challenges the traditional liability schemes that exist to deter negligent physician behavior and compensate injured patients. Liability can arise at each point in a remote monitoring system, from when information is gathered by a device, to when it is processed by an algorithm, and, finally, used by a physician. This chapter explores how different types of liability might arise for device manufacturers and physicians at each of these stages, outlining the main legal rules and complicating factors.

This Handbook brings together a global team of private law experts and computer scientists to examine the interface between private law and AI, which includes issues such as whether existing private law can address the challenges of AI and whether and how private law needs to be reformed to reduce the risks of AI while retaining its benefits.

The AI agency problem is overstated, and many of the issues concerning AI contracting and liability can be solved by treating artificial agents as instrumentalities of persons or legal entities. AI systems should not be characterised as agents for liability purposes. This approach best accords with their functionality and places the correct duties and responsibilities on their human developers and operators.

AI will disrupt the existing tort settlement. Tort law should be tech-impartial – that is, it should not encourage or discourage the adoption of new technologies where they generate the same level of risk, and victim rights should not be eroded by the use of new technologies in place of existing systems of work. Existing tort law is poorly suited to address some AI challenges, and a liability gap will emerge as systems replace employees since AI does not have legal personality and cannot commit a tort. A form of AI statutory vicarious liability should apply in commercial settings to address the liability gap and as the tech-impartial solution.

Law reform is needed to recognise the impact of automation and machine learning systems on the services provided by intermediaries while requiring intermediaries to minimise illicit or harmful content.

This chapter takes a psychological perspective on tort law decision-making, drawing on psychological theory, empirical research, and legal practices in tort litigation to assess the state of knowledge about decision-making in tort cases. It examines how plaintiffs decide to bring a lawsuit, how defendants respond, and the process of dispute resolution in tort cases. Most tort cases do not go to trial, but trial decisions remain significant as a framework for negotiations. The chapter also draws on psychological theory and research to describe how the judge and the jury as decision-makers resolve legal issues and reach liability verdicts and damage awards in tort cases. Psychological heuristics, biases, and other psychological phenomena affect decision-making in intentional tort, negligence, and strict liability cases, and judgments about liability and damages. The chapter closes with suggestions for further investigations of understudied topics in tort law decision-making.

This chapter examines sub-systemic actor’s duties. It treats NATO as indicative of a collective defence organization and the European Union (before the Lisbon treaty that contains two collective defence clauses) as indicative of a collective security organization. This chapter argues that NATO has, if requested to help by a member country, a contractual (Article 5) – and thus overriding – duty to protect a member state, and when must cause is satisfied, with securitization. It is argued that Article 5 is now somewhat outdated and that – going forward – just reason (i.e., the existence of an objective existential threat) + macro-proportionality, and not armed attack, should be the threshold for collective political action. The obligation to use securitizing measures, however, rests with the satisfaction of must cause. This chapter also argues that in collective security organizations, the obligation to securitize insiders, rests with remedial responsibility triggered by ties of community/friendship, this means that unlike in collective defence organizations, the obligation to securitize insiders can be overridden.

This chapter examines the duties of states to insiders (people living within a state’s physical territory) and outsiders (people in other states). It is argued that states have, provided the initiation of securitization is otherwise justified and that must cause is satisfied, an overriding duty to secure insiders from objective existential threat via securitization. Regarding morally mandatory other-securitization, the picture is more mixed, a range of costs to the self, including (1) the risk of death, disease, and disability; (2) the risk of instability and insecurity; and (3) financial costs can override an individual state’s obligation to secure and – where necessary – securitize outsiders from threat. This chapter goes on to examine what happens to pro tanto duties if states are liable for threat creation abroad. Moreover, it suggests a ranking of different triggers for remedial responsibility derived from common-sense morality, enabling the pinpointing of specific states as primary duty-bearers for morally mandatory other-securitization.

The issue of consent to international law obligations and liabilities remains both highly complex in theory and extremely relevant in practice. Although the topic has been addressed quite regularly in the form of articles and chapters, there have been, surprisingly for such a central topic, few monographs on consent to international law in general and no edited volume in English language. Re-examining the issue of consent to international law in depth and in the contemporary circumstances of international law is a timely project therefore. The best way to do so in a rich and nuanced way is to give a voice to many authors at the same time, and this is the purpose of this collection of essays. This introduction sets the volume’s stage: first, it clarifies the relevance of the issue and the reasons that led to putting the book together; second, it introduces the main conceptual and normative challenges addressed in the volume and explains what it hopes to achieve; third, it provides some information about how the book is structured; and, finally, it sketches out the content of its successive chapters and their articulation.