Dr Matt Dyson, a Fellow and College Lecturer in Law at Trinity College was on sabbatical leave in Lent Term 2015. This leave was a chance to complete a number of ongoing projects, develop international contacts for projects being proposed and to do primary research towards a monograph.
The largest single project while on leave was finishing work on Comparing Tort and Crime, an edited work examining the relationship between tort and crime in eight legal systems; it has since been published by CUP and launched at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in London in July. It is a second volume in a series, with the first, Unravelling Tort and Crime having come out in 2014. The third, Explaining Tort and Crime, a monograph on comparative legal development, will look at more than 15 jurisdictions over 150 years and is due for publication in 2017. It was this monograph that necessitated trips to collect primary materials not available in the UK.
At the start of January, Matt was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, which provided access to their excellent library and the opportunity to work with colleagues with specialisations in jurisdictions around the world. Two further projects were begun. The first was an Aktuelle Stunde presentation of work in progress to Reinhard Zimmermann's Lehrstuhl, on the topic of Organ Transplants which transmit disease, a new medical project. The second project was in criminal law in response to the written evidence of the Justice Select Committee investigation on Joint Enterprise. That report had been published in December and the research for Matt's evidence was expanded for publication. That work has since been published as 'The future of joint-up thinking: living in a post-accessory liability world' (2015) 79 Journal of Criminal law 181-197
On 29 January, the preparatory work on organ transplants was presented, on a panel including Nicky Padfield and Kourosh Saeb-Parsey, to the Transplant Unit at Addenbrooke's Hospital. That work was developed further at a Cambridge Private Law Centre Work in Progress Workshop in Easter Term and has since been published in the Lancet in the form of a short comment piece entitled 'Transplanting suboptimal organs: medicolegal implications' Lancet 2015, 386: 719-721. A fuller paper will be presented at the Society of Legal Scholars Conference shortly. This is the first collaboration between the Transplant Unit at Addenbrooke's and the new Law, Medicine and Life Sciences Centre at the Faculty of Law.
Also on 29 January, Matt flew to Sao Paulo, to undertake research as a Visiting Professor. Matt conducted research in Brazilian law, particularly the rules connecting tort and crime. Brazil has a fascinating history in this area, with recent legislative changes on how criminal courts play a role in compensating victims of crime being unique in the world. A presentation to the Faculty, graduate and undergraduate students as well as visiting prosecutors and judges was a chance to introduce a comparative analysis to tort and crime. The presentation was reported in an online Brazilian legal journal and is available online.
Matt then went to Santiago to collect materials and consult with colleagues on Chilean Tort and Crime. He presented at the University of Chile, and the Pontifical University of Chile. A report of the first, is available on the University of Chile website. The trip was an excellent chance to form new links with the excellent researchers there, with the particular help of Cristián Banfi del Río at the Doctoral Program in the University of Chile.
After a brief return to the UK, Matt embarked on a tour of US Universities, again for research, discussion and new partnerships. After a week at Boston University, with Ken Simons (now at UC Irvine) and presenting a staff seminar there, Matt moved to Tulane, at the invitation of Vernon Parlmer and Louisiana State University at the invitation of Olivier Moréteau (pictured above), to gather more materials and give further papers. Matt then went to Washington University at St Louis as a Visiting Scholar, attending a seminar and presenting his work. From there, for the last stop, Matt was the inaugural Bonfield Fellow at the University of Iowa. There, Matt presented on his work as well as conducted extensive research into the law in the United States; the University of Iowa has the third largest law library in the United States (and is the largest public collection) and also has an excellent academic librarian, in the form of Cambridge alumnus, Tom Gallanis.
On his return to the UK, Matt has been working to complete a number of other projects, including the proofs for several articles, such as:
- "La Respuesta del Derecho Civil a Sentencias Penales en Inglaterra y España" InDret 3/2015;
- "Tort and Crime" in Mauro Bussani and Antony Sebok (eds), Comparative Tort Law: Global Perspectives (Edward Elgar); and
- "Precariousness as rhetoric: the role of the state in private and public expressions of justice" in C. Lageot and N. Papineau (eds), Approches franco-britanniques de la précarité: principe(s), droit(s), pratique(s) (LGDJ). This is the publication from a conference co-organised by Matt and colleagues from Poitiers in December 2014.
The work in the period from December 2014 to April 2015 was also forward-looking in other ways, with preparations for work on Commercial Remedies (CUP, 2016), and Landmark Cases in Criminal law (Hart, 2016).
Overall, the leave was an exciting time, finishing projects, starting new ones and developing international research experience and connections. Matt is particularly excited about the chance to work with fascinating colleagues, from his established link with the University of Utrecht through to new opportunities linked to visits made in this period of leave. The key theme in the work has been understanding how legal systems develop: this has been historical and comparative work, with a particular focus on tort law, criminal law and the relationship between the two. This kind of work is particularly important for effective teaching of legal reasoning across the scope of the material that undergraduates engage with at the Faculty of Law. The chance to spend some consolidated time on these projects, particularly in hard to reach but fascinating foreign jurisdictions, is also a chance to revel in the intellectual joy that studying legal phenomena can provide.