Abstract
European jurists increasingly look to their neighbours’ legal concepts and solutions. As decisions of foreign courts are sometimes hardly accessible, it may be helpful to collect the most important ones in a Digest of Modern European Civil Law. The present book is a first step in this direction. It provides, for one specific field, a selection of national cases, which, otherwise, most of us would probably ignore.
This volume focuses on the question of "natural" causation in Europe. Study groups based in 25 different countries have analysed their national jurisprudence and selected the most important cases within the framework of a number of standardized sub-categories. The facts and the decision of each case are summarised and commented on in the light of the relevant national doctrine. On the supranational level, we also present and analyse important decisions of the Courts of Justice of the European Community. Furthermore, we have attempted to provide depth to the discussion by including a historical report, another report on which solution would be yielded by an application of the "Principles of European Tort Law", as well as a comparative summary written by one of the editors.
Just as the European Group on Tort Law with their "Principles of European Tort Law", our group wants, with the present Digest, to contribute to a better understanding of tort law in Europe. We hope that this collection will be useful not only to academics, but also to legislatures and practitioners to whom it makes available the legal solutions and the state of the discussions abroad.
Moreover, if one day the private law, or parts of it, should be unified in a European Civil Code, jurists would quickly need case law to specify its provisions. Contrary to new or revised national codes, which are generally based on a coherent national jurisprudence, the European Code will constitute an amalgamation of traditions, and will not be backed up by a systematic body of previous decisions. To fill this gap, the judges may initially want to refer to the cases collected in this Digest, upon which a genuinely European jurisprudence can be built.
The present book is divided into 11 fundamental categories of "natural" causation. Within each category, the selected cases, solutions and comments are presented in the following manner: each category begins with a historical introduction (1), followed by the reports of the 25 Member States of the European Union (2-26), the decisions of the European Courts of Justice (27), the solutions of hypothetical cases according to the Principles of European Tort Law (28) and finally by a comparative summary (29).
This reader-friendly structure allows individual readers who are interested in a specific problem, such as damage caused by multiple tortfeasors, to seek the relevant information for all countries in chapter 5. Readers looking for the cases and solutions of a particular country, for example England, will find all the English cases under the same number (12) across the book. The comparative reports (29) provide a summary of our main findings for the .more hurried reader.
