Tort and Crime

Abstract

This chapter will set out how the distinction and relationship between tort and crime can be examined comparatively. To do so it gives a framework to prime investigations and to facilitate comparison. It builds on three interfaces of tort and crime: where, how, why they connect. Progressing through these interfaces builds up layers towards a complete picture of the relationship between tort and crime.

The relationship between tort and crime is important. Each legal issue, and the legal system as a whole, is better understood by acknowledging when its parts work in concert not by artificially separating them out. Its interfaces also highlight how important legal actors’ frameworks and practices are in shaping the law. The interfaces between tort and crime provide excellent places to examine the weave of the law: the moral, regulatory, philosophical, political, practical and societal threads, as well as how these feed back to the way the problem is conceived. We are asking, in other words, what the overlaps between areas of law can tell us about law itself.

Keywords: tort, crime, comparative law, compensation, compensation order, adhesion, partie civil