Mainstreams in the Development of European Tort Law: A Front-Line Snapshot
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Mainstreams in the Development of European Tort Law: A Front-Line Snapshot Bernhard A. Koch Institut fu¨r Zivilrecht der Universita¨t Innsbruck, Innrain 52, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria. E-mail: [email protected]
The author presents an overview of some common trends in European tort law systems which are evidenced by significant case law or legislation in the past 5 years. The Geneva Papers (2006) 31, 270–276. doi:10.1057/palgrave.gpp.2510072 Keywords: tort law codification; public liability; human rights; non-pecuniary loss; right to privacy; right to life
Introduction The remarks1 that follow shall weave together some of the threads laid out by the collected contributions to an annual publication which covers the most recent tort law developments in almost all European jurisdictions each year. These tort and insurance law yearbooks2 contain the extended versions of presentations given at the ‘‘Annual Conference on European Tort Law’’ in Vienna, which comes into its fifth season in 2006.3 Throughout these past years, it has been remarkable to notice how certain recurring themes eventually (and often simultaneously) show in almost all jurisdictions, even if unrelated by legal family. There indeed seem to be mainstreams in the development of European tort law, even though the enthusiasm of judges and legislators to look across the boundaries of their own jurisdictions does not seem to have heightened in a way that could explain such common trends.
Tort law (re-) codification The most evident developments in a legal system are of course amendments and additions to its written laws. While such legislative changes have reshaped tort law every now and then throughout Europe and as such would not be worth mentioning,
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The text is based on a presentation given at the occasion of the Annual Liability Regimes Conference in Munich 2005. Both form and style of a manuscript for an oral presentation have been preserved. The first four volumes have been published so far: Koziol and Steininger (2002–2005). All information in the text on developments in specific countries is drawn from reports submitted to these publications of the respective calendar year and is therefore not cited separately. The conference is jointly organized by the European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law (ECTIL, http:// www.ectil.org) and the Research Unit for European Tort Law of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (http://www.etl.oeaw.ac.at). The next conference will take place from April 20–22, 2006 in Vienna.
Bernhard A. Koch Mainstreams in the Development of European Tort Law
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it is quite striking that the willingness to revise tort law as a whole has been spreading throughout Europe over the past years. It may come as no surprise that most countries in the eastern part of Europe have reconsidered (though not necessarily fundamentally changed) their tort laws or are about to do so in the course of comprehensive adjustments to their private law systems as a whole, starting in the 1990s. The new Slovenian Code of Obligations was publi
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