Samuel Beswick (Peter A. Allard School of Law, the University of British Columbia) has posted The Police Officer’s Right of Redress (Journal of Tort Law, vol. 20, 2027, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Should a police officer be able to sue a citizen in tort for harming them? On one view of the theory and practice of private law, they should not. According to this view, a police officer as a public agent is not juridically comparable to a private person and so their interactions with other people—whether as victim or as wrongdoer—simply fall beyond private law’s proper scope. Instead, the appropriate recourse in such cases lies with public law, criminal law and administrative redress schemes. I disagree. In this article, I draw upon English and Canadian jurisprudence to defend the police officer’s right of civil redress. Both as a matter of theory and doctrine, a police officer should be seen as a person who is subject to as well as protected by “the ordinary law of the realm.” That is because a person’s identity as a public agent does not extinguish their identity as a human being. Just as police officers (and firefighters, and tax collectors, and prime ministers) are people capable of assaulting, injuring and defaming, the common law of tort properly recognizes them as people deserving of redress when they are assaulted, injured and defamed.
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