The fields of tort and crime have much in common in practice, particularly in how they both try to respond to wrongs and regulate future behaviour. Despite this commonality in fact, fascinating difficulties have hitherto not been resolved about how legal systems co-ordinate (or leave wild) the border between tort and crime. What is the purpose of tort law and criminal law, and how do you tell the difference between them? Do criminal lawyers and civil lawyers reason and argue in the same way? Are the rules on capacity, consent, fault, causation, secondary liability or defences the same in tort as in crime? How do the rules of procedure operate for each area? Are there points of overlap? When, how and why do tort and crime interact? This volume systematically answers these and other questions for eight legal systems: England, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Scotland, the Netherlands and Australia.

'Dyson provides a broad and measured study with a wealth of in­sights at all levels of abstraction. He might be thought in some respects to have led his reader through an aporetic dialogue to an unsettling appreciation of our extensive ignorance; nothing becomes as clear as the need to know more. Throughout the text, however, Dyson specifically highlights a myriad of areas for further investigation and casts clear light on where he sees that the analysis should lead next.' Andrew J. Bell, Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht

Matthew Dyson is a Fellow in Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he specialises in the relationship between tort and crime. He teaches tort law, criminal law, Roman law, comparative law and European legal history. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Girona, Valencia, Sydney, Göttingen and Utrecht, and been a visitor at Harvard as well as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg.