Concurrent Duties

This paper offers an account of concurrent liability, and in particular the existence of, and interaction between, concurrent contractual and non‐contractual duties. It argues for five essential propositions: (1) a defendant can owe simultaneous private law duties towards a claimant, the content of which overlaps in whole or in part; (2) cases of concurrent liability in contract and negligence involve independent duties, which are concurrent but not coextensive; (3) the doctrine of concurrent liability is conceptually distinct from the rule that the claimant must elect between inconsistent remedies; (4) if the defendant commits a wrong in breach of more than one duty, the claimant has a prima facie choice to sue for any of those breaches; and (5) the content of one any duty might affect the content of the other. The last of these principles, it is argued, provide an explanation for the recent decisions in Wellesley Partners v Withers and AIB v Mark Redler.     

Inching Toward Accountability: The Evolution of Brazil's Anticorruption Institutions, 1985–2010

This article analyzes the evolution of the network of Brazilian federal accountability institutions over the course of the past generation, between the transition to democracy and the end of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's second term. Substantively, the article charts the significant gains that have been made in accountability institutions. Theoretically, it evaluates the evolution of these institutions as a consequence of the distribution of rules, routines, roles, and resources across a larger institutional network, demonstrating that changes in the various bureaucratic agencies have mutually reinforced each other and generated autocatalytic processes of reform.