Erik Knutsen

Erik Knutsen
Queen's University | QueensU · Faculty of Law

H.B.A. (Lakehead), J.D. (Osgoode Hall), LL.M. (Harvard Law School)

About

27
Publications
6,401
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33
Citations

Publications

Publications (27)
Chapter
This book brings together leading experts in the fields of insurance and the law of obligations to consider how insurance law is attempting to deal with emerging risks. Emerging risks pose significant challenges for the insurance industry. Apart from difficulties in quantifying such risks, the availability of insurance capacity is often a concern....
Chapter
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Channeling Charles Dickens (from his A Tale of Two Cities), a legal observer might describe COVID-19 insurance coverage disputes in similar terms. Although U. K. and E. U. policyholders would hesitate to describe their Covid coverage situation as ideal, it has been close to the worst of times for...
Book
When Canadian Tort Law was first published in 1972, it became the first treatise on the law of torts in Canada. The eleventh edition continues the standard of excellence achieved by each previous edition. As the treatise most commonly cited by the Supreme Court of Canada and other Canadian courts, Canadian Tort Law has greatly influenced the develo...
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The Principles attempts to straddle the bipolar textualist and contextualist camps of American insurance jurisprudence by providing a set of interpretive principles that draw on the best of both legal traditions. By understanding how the law of Canadian insurance policy interpretation operates-and fails-those charged with the task of drafting the P...
Article
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Nowadays, everything is always someone else’s fault. In the fault-based tort system in Canada, that often translates into injury cases exhibiting greater tendencies for presenting with complex information about how an injured victim’s injuries were caused. In many instances, the additional causation information is unwanted, irrelevant and muddies t...
Article
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Causation in insurance law is an area where courts continuously experience difficulties. This is largely because in insurance law causation is used as a payouttrigger, a separate and distinct element from the traditional “but for” causation generally found in tort. This article proposes a framework for understanding the mechanics of causation as a...
Article
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The personal injury litigation system itself is dynamic and highly interdependent. It is an intertwined system of tort law, insurance law and procedural law. If you pull one corner, another unravels somewhere else. For this reason, proposals for reform need to be thought of in holistic fashion. Can the challenges faced by personal injury lawyers an...
Article
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Should losses resulting from criminal or intentional conduct be insurable through liability insurance? Insurers have crafted fortuity clauses in liability policies in order to ensure that coverage is available only for fortuitous losses, not certainties. Two common fortuity clauses oust coverage for losses arising from “intentional” or “criminal” a...
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Nothing in tort causes more confusion than causation. In early 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear Clements (Litigation Guardian of) v. Clements,1 on appeal from the British Columbia Court of Appeal. At trial and appeal, this case pitted negligence law’s default “but for” test for causation against the alternative material contribution test...
Article
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Automobile insurance in Canada is a product with a decidedly public purpose, a social contract. The provincial governments are heavily involved in the creation, regulation, drafting, and operation of the automobile insurance regime in any particular province. This public flavour to Canadian automobile insurance necessarily should affect the way one...
Article
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Costs today play a disproportionate role in many civil litigation decisions in Canada because of the inherent unpredictability built into the current overly complex costs system. Canada’s civil litigation system utilizes a fee shifting regime whereby an unsuccessful litigant must pay a proportion of the successful litigant’s legal fees. This costs...
Article
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Advocates contemplating seeking Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in personal injury cases face a unique decision calculus. The strategy at this Court is different from that of other appellate courts because the Supreme Court of Canada uses a particular test for granting Leave: “public importance.” One must first ask for Leave from the...
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This article explores the tensions between the perceived public and private aspects of the litigation system by using the debate surrounding whether or not the public civil justice system can and should tolerate secret settlements in standard, non-aggregate private law disputes. By evaluating the arguments against secret settlements in this context...
Article
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The current state of the law with respect to concurrent causation in insurance produces unpredictable results. The insurance system may not reliably function in the wake of a large scale multi-causal disaster - a hurricane, earthquake, or terrorist strike - that causes widespread losses to many policyholders at once. Courts, parties, and academics...
Article
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This article about causation in negligence law is different from past attempts at unraveling causation in Canada. It argues that there is nothing overly confusing about the law of causation in negligence. Rather than lament the confusing state of affairs or argue for a new causation test, the article attempts to define the current state of causatio...
Article
The driving public cannot reliably predict when an accident is covered or not covered by automobile insurance. Neither can lawyers assisting accident victims or auto insurers. For example, if a driver operating a vehicle drops a child off to play and the child is seriously hurt crossing the street, is the child covered by first party no-fault autom...
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It is the aim of this article to propose a novel system of dispute resolution for disputes which turn on interpretations of complex but uncertain scientific evidence. Part II identifies a specific subset of legal disputes that can only be resolved through policy judgments from ambiguous scientific data. Recognizing the underlying commonalities of t...
Article
Ontario's new securities legislation, Bill 198, closes the gate on securities class actions. Yet the legislation does not make such an ulterior purpose initially evident. Indeed, the new statutory revisions to the Securities Act have thus far been touted as a compromise between the interests of securities class action defendants and plaintiffs. Def...
Article
Limitation periods are, by nature, defense-sensitive. They are designed to bring closure, predictability and insurability to defendants while at the same time prompting plaintiffs not to sleep on their rights. Current trends in evolving legal doctrine continue to modify the effect of limitation periods in favor of a plaintiff in special circumstanc...
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The common law has developed exceptions around statutory limitation periods which, when applied, restore the plaintiff's right to bring a claim in certain special circumstances. The first of these exceptions is the doctrine of discoverability. This doctrine delays the start of the limitation period until such time that the plaintiff is aware of the...
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Understanding the application of judicially created cause-in-fact doctrine to a case where proof of cause is at best ambiguous, necessitates understanding what has driven the court to tinker with existing tort doctrine in the first place. It is the aim of this article to explore .how these three modifications to traditional cause-in-fact principles...
Article
From radio to telephone to television and now the Internet, the evolution of new media technology has soundly tested the value that society, through the law, places on freedom of expression. The law's reaction to new media technology mirrors society's reaction in many ways. Uneasiness of the power and breadth of a new media's expressive possibiliti...

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