The laws of the countries that emerged on the territory of the former Soviet Union show profound similarities due to a number of shared historical experiences. They have all been parts of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and have all gone, simultaneously albeit not uniformly, down the thorny path of post-socialist transition. The resulting common legacies concern deep-lying features of legal method as well as central structures of substantive law. The codification movement, institutional design, way of functioning and the role of the judiciary, and the extent of the professionalisation of law and the flaws of legal academia as well as the current state of property law and the law of legal persons provide prime examples. Disregarding these continuities results in distorted images based, in particular, on overemphasised formal similarities to the civil law family. Therefore, joint consideration of the formerly Soviet, but also formerly tsarist and formerly post-Soviet countries, remains an indispensable tool of legal comparison.

Conclusion. The books conclusion reprises the arguments advanced for and against recognition of the new public nusiance law, evaluating the competing claims made by the critics and commentators. The conclusion strives for a balanced appreciation of the merits and demerits of the competing arguments. The conclusion turns to three central themes: (1) that of the continued, creative, innovative plaintiffs lawyering for fifty years in mass tort litigation, continually asserting new claims and expanding legal boundaries, (2) that the new public law is best understood as yet another innovation in the historical arc of mass tort litigation, and (3) that the fate of the new public law is most likely to follow the legal trajectory of the development of medical monitoring as a tool in the mass tort litigators toolbox. The narrative history of the evolution of medical monitoring is explored to demonstrate the parallelism between medical monitoring and the new public nuisance law. The book concludes with the observations that the new public nuisance law is in its nascent stages of development and is in flux. But it is here to stay, in the same way that mass tort jurisprudence embraced medical monitoring.

[8.1] The law of statutory interpretation directs us to ascertain the ‘purpose’ of an Act when construing a provision of that Act. This is one of the few general principles of statutory interpretation law that is the subject of a legislative mandate, though the common law has developed an equivalent principle. The mandate is that we must have regard to the purpose of an Act and choose the construction that promotes or best achieves that purpose. This does not warrant neglect of the statutory text or context, but instead requires the interpreter to have regard to the purpose in the context of the broader analysis of text and context required by the rules of statutory interpretation. Sometimes the purpose will be critical to the task of attributing meaning and sometimes it will be of little value. The value that purpose can provide to the task may depend on the degree of specificity with which it can be expressed. Many Acts embody multiple purposes or the purpose of the Act may be general. For these reasons, the purpose of the provision being construed can be more helpful for the interpretative task than the purpose of the Act as a whole.