James Goudkamp's recent publication, Tort Law Defences, is a bold work that is exploratory and provocative, challenging conventional thinking about tort law. It was awarded joint Second Prize for the 2014 Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. The last two decades have seen considerable academic work on tort law, largely focused on theoretical frameworks for analysis of the positive elements of torts. There has, however, been little effort given to analysing tort law defences as a unified field, unlike criminal law scholarship, which has devoted itself for decades to theorizing about criminal law defences.