Of Neighbours and Netizens, Or, Duty of Care in the Tech Age: A Comment on Cooper v. Hobart

The focal point of this comment will be the recent judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Cooper v. Hobart, which appears to have made some significant changes to the elements of ‘‘duty of care’’, the foundational negligence concept. The Court framed its decision as refining duty of care analysis in order to properly deal with ‘‘novel claims’’ (i.e., those for which there is not an established or analogous duty of care in the existing case law). Given that the growth of elec- tronic commerce and Internet usage continues to spawn ‘‘novel’’ legal issues, Cooper is an appropriate starting point for a discussion of whether the law, as it stands, provides courts with the tools to determine when and where new duties of care should arise.