The Law of Nuisance in Canada, Gregory S Pun & Margaret I Hall (Markham, Ont: LexisNexis, 2010)

Abstract

“There is perhaps no more impenetrable jungle in the entire law,” Dean Page Keeton once wrote, “than that which surrounds the word ‘nuisance.”’ Such impenetrability may explain steps taken in England to subsume nuisance law into the fault-based law of negligence. It does not take much imagination to appreciate why the English would move in that direction. At some point, after all — Dean Keeton’s jungle floor having become impossible to navigate — practitioners and judges must be tempted to join the academic lawyers who gaze down from the treetops. The perspective from the canopy might well persuade them that their problem is not amenable to the small doctrinal fix of cutting a path through a grove or two. Rather, it is more fundamental, going to the very lay of the land. They therefore abandon nuisance law’s tangled thickets  altogether, preferring — to bring the metaphor home now for a decent burial — the broader and more familiar paths of negligence law.