
- •Contents
- •General editors’ preface
- •Preface
- •Contributors
- •Table of legislation
- •Austria
- •Belgium
- •England
- •Finland
- •France
- •Germany
- •Greece
- •Italy
- •Portugal
- •Scotland
- •Spain
- •Sweden
- •The Netherlands
- •Austria
- •Belgium
- •Finland
- •France
- •Germany
- •Greece
- •Italy
- •Portugal
- •Spain
- •Sweden
- •The Netherlands
- •Abbreviations
- •1 The notion of pure economic loss and its setting
- •Introduction
- •Pure vs. consequential economic loss
- •Actor’s state of mind: intention vs. negligence
- •The standard cases: a taxonomy
- •Ricochet loss
- •Transferred loss
- •Closure of public markets, transportation corridors and public infrastructures
- •Present vs. future loss
- •In the scale of human values
- •In historical perspective
- •2 The rule against recovery in negligence for pure economic loss: an historical accident?
- •Introduction
- •Continental law before the nineteenth century
- •The Roman texts
- •The natural law schools
- •The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
- •Germany
- •Before the code
- •England
- •Conclusion
- •3A Pure economic loss: an economic analysis
- •Introduction
- •Basic institutions of the market economy
- •Basic rights
- •Freedom of contract
- •Private property
- •Liability
- •Stable legal environment
- •Stable currency
- •Open markets
- •Procedural guarantees
- •Relationship between public bodies
- •Relationships between public bodies and citizens
- •Externalities, rent seeking and dynamic markets
- •Looking at the cases
- •Conclusion
- •A concise summary
- •The economics of pure economic loss
- •Socially relevant externalities and the optimal scope of liability
- •Pure economic loss as a social cost
- •Pure economic loss: towards an economic restatement
- •In search of comparable categories: a hypothesis
- •Recasting the economic loss rule
- •Practical problems in the application of the economic loss rule
- •The problem of foreseeability of pure economic losses
- •Problems of derivative and open-ended litigation
- •Conclusion
- •4 American tort law and the (supposed) economic loss rule
- •Introduction: the relative unimportance of an exclusionary rule in the United States
- •Products liability as an exception
- •Rationales of the rule
- •Contexts and cases
- •Conclusion
- •5 The liability regimes of Europe – their façades and interiors
- •Introduction
- •Two alternative formulas: from façades to operative rules
- •General vs. specific characteristics
- •The liberal, pragmatic and conservative regimes of tort
- •The liberal regimes of France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Greece
- •France – an enigmatic liberalism
- •In the Belgian looking glass
- •Italy’s recent revolution
- •The Spanish countercurrents
- •Greece’s liberal credentials
- •The pragmatic regimes of England, Scotland and the Netherlands
- •England’s cautious and pragmatic judges
- •Scotland: an ambiguous pragmatism
- •A middle path in the Netherlands
- •The conservative regimes of Germany, Austria, Portugal, Sweden and Finland
- •Germany: narrow in tort but wide in contract
- •The transformed general clause
- •The resort to contractual actions
- •Portugal’s continuous resort to German sources
- •Sweden and Finland: nulla injuria sine lege?
- •Conclusion
- •6 Preliminary remarks on methodology
- •Aim and method of the study
- •The common core approach
- •The three-level response
- •7 The case studies
- •National Reporters and the Editors
- •Comparative Commentary
- •Mauro Bussani and Vernon Valentine Palmer
- •Case 1: cable I – the blackout
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 2: cable II – the factory shutdown
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 3: cable III – the day-to-day workers
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 4: convalescing employee
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 5: requiem for an Italian all star
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 6: the infected cow
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 7: the careless architect
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 8: the cancelled cruise
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 9: fire in the projection booth
- •Case 10: the dutiful wife
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 11: a maestro’s mistake
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 12: double sale
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 13: subcontractor’s liability
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 14: poor legal services
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 16: truck blocking entrance to business premises
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 17: auditor’s liability
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 18: wrongful job reference
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 19: breach of promise
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •Case 20: an anonymous telephone call
- •Editors’ comparative comments
- •8 Summary and survey of the cases and results
- •Introduction
- •Reappraising the divides
- •Certainty vs. uncertainty
- •9 General conclusions of the study
- •Irrelevance of legal families
- •Absence of methodological common core
- •Awareness of the time factor
- •The substantive common core
- •Consequential loss
- •Intentional harm
- •Key areas of selective protection
- •Summary on the ‘limited common core’
- •Introduction
- •Pure economic loss astride private law frontiers
- •The place of pure economic loss within different possible frames of a tort law codification
- •Possible basic scenarios
- •A code imposing liability on the ground of a rigid typecast set of provisions
- •A tort law codification adopting a ‘general clause’: the selection of recoverable losses as the crucial choice
- •A destiny to be interpreted
- •Bibliography
- •Index
Contributors
Jürgen Backhaus, Professor, Krupp Chair in Public Finance and Fiscal Sociology, University of Erfurt, Germany
Estathios Banakas, Professor of Law, Director of European Private Law Programme, Norwich Law School, University of East Anglia, England
Willem H. van Boom, Senior Lecturer in Law, Tilburg University, the Netherlands
Mauro Bussani, Professor of Law, University of Trieste, Italy; General Editor of the Common Core Project
Kostas Christodoulou, Lecturer in Law, University of Athens, Greece Lloyd Embleton, Solicitor; Scotland
James Gordley, Cecil Shannon Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Pier Giuseppe Monateri, Professor of Law, University of Turin, Italy Alberto Musy, Professor of Law, University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy
Christel de Noblet, Adjunct Professor of Law, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA and member of the Barreau de Paris, France
Pedro del Olmo, Professor of Law, University Carlos III, Madrid, Spain Vernon Valentine Palmer, Thomas Pickles Professor of Law, Director of
European Legal Studies, Director of Paris Institute of European Legal Studies, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA
Fernando Pantaleón, Professor of Law, University Carlos III, Madrid, Spain Francesco Parisi, Professor of Law, George Mason University, School of Law and Co-Director, J. M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy, Program
in Economics and the Law, Arlington, USA
Willibald Posch, Professor of Law, University of Graz, Austria
Mathias Reimann, Professor of Law, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Bernd Schilcher, Professor of Law, University of Graz, Austria
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Gary T. Schwartz, late Warren Professor of Law, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
Alessandro Simoni, Professor of Law, University of Florence, Italy
Jorge Sinde Monteiro, Professor of Law, University of Coimbra, Portugal Joseph Thomson, Regius Professor of Law, University of Glasgow, Scotland Jean-Marc Trigaux, Public Prosecutor and formerly Assistant Professor of
Law, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
Contributors to the case studies
Austria: |
Willibald Posch and Bernd Schilcher |
Belgium: |
Jean-Marc Trigaux |
England: |
Estathios Banakas |
France: |
Vernon Valentine Palmer and Christel de Noblet |
Germany: |
Mathias Reimann |
Greece: |
Kostas Christodoulou |
Italy: |
Pier Giuseppe Monateri and Alberto Musy |
Portugal: |
Jorge Sinde Monteiro |
Scotland: |
Joseph Thomson and Lloyd Embleton |
Spain: |
Pedro del Olmo and Fernando Pantaleón |
Sweden and Finland: |
Alessandro Simoni |
The Netherlands: |
Willem van Boom |