- •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
360 t h e c o m p a r a t i v e e v i d e n c e : c a s e r e s p o n s e s
information (in this case, for example, Quirinalis was assumed to be the original painter and thus the person most qualified to discover a forgery).542
Editors’ comparative comments
Analysis of the answers to this case confirms the crucial role played by the notion of pure economic loss in revealing operative, as opposed to theoretical, borderlines among the classic fields of private law.
Perusal shows that in the particular circumstances of the case, most of the European countries examined (excepting the Dutch, Swedish and Finnish fact-driven positions) allow the recoverability of the plaintiff’s loss whenever the defendant’s conduct is particularly blameworthy, although Austria, Germany and Greece tend to achieve the same result by means of rules other than tort law rules.
Again, from a technical point of view, one notes that England and Scotland, at least in principle, bridge the gap between their pragmatic regimes and the liberal ones by admitting recoverability through reference to ‘close, almost physical, proximity’ and the criterion of ‘reasonable reliance’ as set forth in Hedley Byrne. A partial turnabout from current comparative standpoints occurs, on the other hand, in those civil law countries which rely on a rule of liability (contractual in Greece and Germany, quasi-contractual in Austria) implemented when a consideration has been given to the defendant – the provider of the bad advice.
In the circumstances of this case, it comes as no surprise to find that, contrary to what happens when the result is channelled through straightforward rules (or attitudes), the endeavour to strike a balance between the interests of the giver and recipient of the ‘bad advice’ makes each contributor carefully weigh every single aspect of the cause of action, no matter on what the latter is grounded – be it common tort law, common contract law, general principles such as ‘abuse of the law’, statutory or codistic rules. Nor is it surprising to find that in many legal systems (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands) liability depends on proof of a high degree of fault upon Quirinalis – which appears to be the key factor in deciding whether to leave the loss as it stands or to shift it to the painter. Both these orientations simply answer a general need that transcends the legal solution to be given to a particular case.
542 Kleineman, passim.
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Needless to say, one cannot take seriously a view which either regards tort liability as a system of independent modules, or attributes a role unaffected by the specific circumstances of the case to each element of the cause of action. Remarks such as ‘some interests are protected against certain types of conduct, others against other types of conduct’,543 or la diligence requise à l’égard des biens garantis est beaucoup plus grande que celle requise à l’égard des intérˆets purement économiques,544 are nothing but the ‘nutshell’ outcomes of a longstanding scientific tradition545 that should be taken for granted by every tort specialist, regardless of whether he or she is a civil or common lawyer.
543J. S. Colyer, A Modern View of the Law of Torts (Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1966), p. 30. See also, e.g. H. T. Terry, ‘Proximate Consequences in the Law of Torts’ (1914) 28 Harvard Law Review 10, at 15, 26; D. Payne, ‘Foresight and Remoteness in Negligence’ (1962) 25 Modern Law Review 16; W. L. Prosser and W. P. Keeton, On the Law of Torts (5th edn,
St. Paul, 1984), pp. 205 ff., 296 ff.; E. Deutsch, Fahrlässigkeit und erforderliche Sorgfalt (Köln, 1963), pp. 62 ff., 157 ff., 171.
544J. Delyannis, La notion d’acte illicite considéré en sa qualité d’élément de la faute délictuelle
(Paris, 1952), p. 119. See also C. Aubry and C. F. Rau, Cours de droit civil français (6th edn, ed. P. Esmein, Paris, 1956), (Eng. trans., St. Paul, 1969, § 444 bis, 445): ‘certain interests are not protected, either because they are counterbalanced by interests judged to be more important for society, such as the case of damage caused by lawful competition, or because they cannot be fully safeguarded, and because anyone suffering an injury to them has the advantage of being able to inflict the same inconvenience upon others, as in the case of reasonable disturbances of neighbourhood.’
545See a short survey in C. von Bar, The Common European Law of Torts, vol. II (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000), pp. 249–71; M. Bussani, ‘Perfiles comparativos sobre la responsabilidad civil: La culpa al servicio de los débiles’, in J. F. Palomino Manchego and R. Velasquez Ramirez (eds.), Modernas tendencias del derecho en America Latina. Actas de la I Convención Latinoamericana de Derecho (Grijley, Lima, 1997), pp. 393 ff.; M. Bussani,
La colpa soggettiva. Modelli di valutazione della condotta nella responsabilità extracontrattuale (Cedam, Padova, 1991); M. Bussani, As peculíaridades da noção de culpa: um estudo de direito comparado (Livraria do Advogado, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2000). Some further examples in R. Demogue, Traité des obligations in général, 1, III (Paris, 1923), p. 378; J. B. Ames (1905) 18 Harvard Law Review 411, 412; W. A. Seavey, ‘Negligence – Subjective or Objective?’ (1927) 41 Harvard Law Review 1, at 13; Restatement of the Law, Torts, 2d,
§ 298 d; H. De Page, Traité élémentaire de droit civil belge, II (2nd edn, Bruxelles, 1948), pp. 1012 ff.; A. Sourdat, Traité général de la responsabilité ou de l’action en dommages-intérˆets en dehors des contrats I, 2 (Paris, 1872), pp. 614 ff.; J. J. Honorat, L’idée d’acceptation des risques dans la responsabilité civile (Paris, 1969), passim, esp. pp. 28 ff., 89, 230; G. Viney and P. Jourdain, Les conditions de la responsabilité (2nd edn, Paris, 1998), pp. 491 ff.; P. Cane, Atiyah’s Accidents, Compensation and the Law (5th edn, London, 1993), pp. 5, 95; H. L. A. Hart and A. Honoré, Causation in the Law (2nd edn, Oxford, 1985), pp. 40, 77, 149 ff., 482 ff.; F. Chabas, L’influence de la pluralité de causes sur le droit à réparation (Paris, 1967), p. 92.