From:                                         Hilary Young <hilaryanyoung@yahoo.ca>

Sent:                                           Monday 18 May 2026 02:44

To:                                               Stéphane Sérafin

Cc:                                               Jack Enman-Beech; obligations@uwo.ca

Subject:                                     Re: A New Tort of "Intimate Partner Violence" - Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026 SCC 16

 

Hello all,

 

I'm hesitant to weigh in without yet having read the decision (other than headnotes) but thought I'd add my view that the tort in Ahluwalia is perhaps unnecessary but definitely potentially quite problematic in the context of family law proceedings (about which I know nothing). This raises the Nevsun issue about whether necessity is enough to create a new tort or whether incrementalism remains crucial. 

 

Ahluwalia also seems to me to mark another milestone in making private law more like public law (more about punishment, condemnation, and deterrence, less about compensation). There's also a fair labeling argument that a student of mine has written about (but not yet published). Apparently 'fair labeling' is an important criminal law concept because of the stigma involved with criminality, but has not really been a thing in tort. Nevsun and now Ahluwalia suggest fair labeling is now a thing in tort.

 

Best,

 

--Hilary

 

 

On Sunday, May 17, 2026 at 10:51:10 a.m. ADT, Stéphane Sérafin <finseraste@gmail.com> wrote:

 

 

Jack,

 

Your "incremental development" point highlights a deeper weakness with the prevailing approach to novel torts even prior to this (in my view) wrongheaded decision.

 

It is surely not the case that novel torts should be recognized on the basis of broader social trends alone, and yet the absence of a coherent theory of what tort law does makes it inevitable that the "vibe of the thing" ends up dictating outcomes. Hence the essential weakness of typical arguments against novel torts, which offer little except for a call to prudence and to slow down. Hardly compelling stuff.

 

 

From: Jack Enman-Beech <jenmanbeech@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, 17 May 2026 at 4:32 AM
To:
Cc: obligations@uwo.ca <obligations@uwo.ca>
Subject: Re: A New Tort of "Intimate Partner Violence" - Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026 SCC 16

I'm not convinced by the need for the new tort -- it seems like the problem of recognizing a pattern, that a number of individual torts can add up to something more significant than any one of them, could be dealt with by a procedural innovation allowing damages for, say, assault, to consider such cumulative effects. It seems also that the Court of Appeal did just that. And I'm not sure what's at stake in the insistence that the wrong here is not just one of extent, magnified by accumulation, but one of kind that sounds as breach of a distinct right. I would not want a new tort such as this to obscure the seriousness of existing torts.

That said, I'll tend to defer to the others on this list when it comes to torts and I'm intrigued to see that, so far at least, there has not been push-back. Certainly innovative even while, as Stéphane notes, consistent with existing legal and social trends and thus in accordance with the Supreme Court's stated approach to incremental changes in the law. The Court might have more clearly identified (at eg para 173) the distinctiveness of family relationships that must be the basis for isolating the "intimate partner" part of intimate partner violence, and that could have been, perhaps for the better, less innovative.

 

Yours truly &c.,

Jack

 

Dr John Enman-Beech

Assistant Professor, University of Alberta
SSRN, UAlberta