Paul S Davies, Accessory Liability
| Published date | 01 May 2016 |
| Pages | 242-244 |
| Date | 01 May 2016 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2016.0350 |
Private law is difficult enough where only two parties are involved. Adding a third, or more, may give rise to difficult issues of apportionment, attribution, and accessory liability. Paul Davies' book deals with this third point. It traverses the English law of obligations (contract, tort, and those “duties” owed by a trustee or fiduciary) to attempt to distill a rational and systematic answer to the question: when will a third party's involvement in the commission of a civil wrong afford the aggrieved party a claim against that third party?
Davies' thesis is that specialisation and over-compartmentalisation has fettered the development of principle in this area. Instead of each area of the law having its own rules of accessory liability, Davies submits that, in what one may call the “general part” of private law, the same approach should be adopted regardless of the nature of the primary wrong. This is vouchsafed by examining each of the discreet areas of the law of obligations, and also by drawing inspiration from the criminal law of accessories, an account of which is given in chapter 3.
The main body of the work employs a common structure. First, the level of conduct required for a third party to attract liability is examined. Second, the necessary mental element is discussed. Third, the justifications for the imposition of accessory liability (introduced in chapter 2) are assessed, and the question of whether the present extent of the conduct and mental elements are justified in light of those rationales is posed. Finally, Davies concludes with setting out his view of the “shape” accessory liability should take in that context.
A decade ago, a Scots reviewer could skip over a chapter discussing accessory liability in equity without much need for comment. But the decisions of the Inner House in
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