National Court Practice and European Tort Law I

This project shall collect, analyze and structure the entire body of case law from all over Europe on the issue of causation of damage. This complex comparative study shall not only offer guid-ance for researching current cross- border cases, but allow a discussion of upcoming projects on the harmonisation of European tort laws on the basis of real-life case settings. The various national legal systems offer quite a broad range of replies to the question who will ultimately bear the loss, for example, in a traffic accident, even though results do not diverge as much as some of the reasonings offered. The "European Group on Tort Law" has therefore em-barked on drafting "Principles of European Tort Law", which shall be a systematic collection of basic rules that could serve as a model for the future harmonisation of these manifold European tort law systems, which is already highly debated throughout Europe. Since those "Principles" are founded upon a thorough examination of all existing legal systems, the rules shall be accept-able to all jurisdictions for a smooth transition to a harmonized system. A first draft of these "Principles" has already been completed. With a new common European law of torts, however, the broad range of experience derived from extensive court practice on the basis of prior law will no longer be of equal use as before. The proposed project shall help to overcome such downsides: Court decisions from almost thirty European jurisdictions will be systematically selected in order to cover a broad range of central aspects of tort law. These cases will be analyzed and commented both from a national as well as a comparative perspective. Furthermore, the impact of these rulings on the future European law of torts will be highlighted. Finally, each case will be solved on the basis of these new rules in order to provide both academics and practitioners with an analytically structured body of case law derived from a comparative analysis of international court practice. The project will there-fore build a bridge from prior national case law to the new body of uniform tort law, which shall aid to extend the continuity of legal development in Europe. The results of this study shall first be published on the Internet. The proposed project shall first cover one key aspect of tortious liability - causation: Not even the question who has actually caused the harm is answered as unanimously as one might expect. These issues are particularly suitable for a startup project of this kind, whose results and the ex-perience gained thereby shall serve as a fruitful basis for follow-up projects on further key ele-ments of tort law.

This project collects the fundamental case law on the most important aspects of causation of damage from almost thirty European countries. The assembled body of cases have been commented upon and thoroughly analysed from a comparative as well as from a historical perspective. Furthermore, European Union Law has been extensively referred to. This complex comparative study not only offers guidance for researching current cross-border cases, but also allows for a discussion on the harmonisation of European tort laws on the basis of real-life case settings. Harmonisation seems desirable especially in view of the existing differences between the particular jurisdictions of the EU Member States. The various national legal systems offer quite a broad range of responses to the question of who will ultimately bear the loss and what compensation will be awarded, although quite often the applied solutions do not diverge as much as some of the reasonings offered. As a first step towards the unification, the "European Group on Tort Law" has drafted "Principles of European Tort Law" - a systematic collection of basic rules that can serve as a model for the future harmonisation of the manifold European tort law systems, which is already highly debated throughout Europe. While applying the new common European law of torts, it will obviously not be possible to benefit from the court practice based on prior national law. The project will help overcome this downside by analysing seminal judgements reached across European courts and linking them to European law. Its first part covers one of the key aspects of tortious liability, namely causation, since not even the question of who has actually caused the harm is answered as unanimously as one might expect. Due to its self-containment, the issue of causation is particularly suitable as a start-up for a comparative study on tort law. The results of the project shall serve as a basis for future follow-up analyses of further key elements of tort law.