“[The] Plaintiff enrolled in First year law at [Dalhousie] and on mid term examinations in Criminal Law, Public Law, Property and Torts had a B- average; that from that date until on or about May 26, 1993 Plaintiff’s alleged grades steadily became lower as Defendants, and each of them, willfully, intentionally, maliciously, knowingly, unlawfully, wrongfully or by their negligence and lack of skill caused Plaintiff to become ‘brain dead’ and a ‘vegetable’.”

– Sherman v. Governors of Dalhousie College and University (1996)

“By this time it might seem that the parties have become so far disembodied spirits that their actual persons should be allowed to rest in peace. In their place rises the figure of the fair and reasonable man. And the spokesman of the fair and reasonable man, who represents after all no more than the anthropomorphic conception of justice, is and must be the court itself.”
– Radcliffe in Davis Contractors v Fareham (1956)

“The result would be to taunt the tort.”
– Wittman in Fiala v. Cechmanek (2001)

In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the young men play and the old men watch. In the village of Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is kept short. It has a good club house for the players and seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that they must not play there any more. He has issued an injunction to stop them. He has done it at the instance of a newcomer who is no lover of cricket. This newcomer has built, or has had built for him, a house on the edge of the cricket ground which four years ago was a field where cattle grazed. The animals did not mind the cricket. But now this adjoining field has been turned into a housing estate. The newcomer bought one of the houses on the edge of the cricket ground. No doubt the open space was a selling point. Now he complains that when a batsman hits a six the ball has been known to land in his garden or on or near his house. His wife has got so upset about it that they always go out at week-ends. They do not go into the garden when cricket is being played. They say that this is intolerable. So they asked the judge to stop the cricket being played. And the judge, much against his will, has felt that he must order the cricket to be stopped: with the consequence, I suppose, that the Lintz Cricket Club will disappear. The cricket ground will be turned to some other use. I expect for more houses or a factory. The young men will turn to other things instead of cricket. The whole village will be much the poorer. And all this because of a newcomer who has just bought a house there next to the cricket ground.

– Denning in Miller v Jackson, 1977.

“I would use of international law the words which Galileo used of the earth: ‘But it does move.’”
– Denning in Trendtex Trading Corp v Central Bank of Nigeria (1977)

“and there are pure-minded women and there are innocent children — innocent in a sense even beyond the degree of innocence of childhood itself.”
– Reynolds v United States (1878)

Furthermore, under [British Columbia's land registration] system, priorities are based on the date of registration rather than the date when the right is acquired, and therefore cannot accommodate aboriginal title, which has its source in the occupancy and use of lands prior to the assertion of sovereignty by the Crown.

- Justice Lamperson in Skeetchestn Indian Band v. British Columbia (2000).

[T]he land itself is one thing, and the estate in land is another thing, for an estate in the land is a time in the land, or land for a time, and there are diversities of estates, which are no more than diversities of time, for he who has a fee-simple in land has a time in the land without end, or the land for a time without end, and he who has land in tail has a time in the land or the land for time as long as he has issues of his body, and he who has an estate in land for life has no time in it longer than for his own life, and so of him who has an estate in land for the life of another, or for years.

- Walsingham’s Case (1579)

Does it not prejudicially, that is to say injuriously, disadvantageously, which is the meaning of the word “prejudicially” …

- Chief Justice Ritchie in Barrett v. City of Winnipeg (1891)