Tomasz Jędrzejewski, indeed something isn't correct here.

The spec doesn't mention cascaded validation for validateProperty() at all, hence I think it shouldn't be supported to pass a dot path "emb2.i2" to validateProperty() at all. It was added at some point to Hibernate Validator, though (I'm not sure when or why). I'm kind of thinking that we should remove this "feature" from HV again, I'm only a bit concerned about people that may have come to rely on it. So perhaps we should disable it by default but have an option to explicitly enable it, raising a warning, though. And then we'd eventually remove it in a future version.

I'm not fully sure whether I understand you preference. Would you also expect dot paths not to be supported at all, or would you expect them to be supported (with or without @Valid given on the property)?