Along came a spider...

The present Website is the companion to Tort Law, pictured on the left. The book contains cases and other material on Tort Law, is part of the series of Casebooks for the Common Law of Europe. The objective of this work, and of the whole series, is to help to uncover common roots, notwithstanding differences in approach, of the European legal systems with a view to strengthening the common legal heritage of Europe, not to strangling its diversity. The authors hope that Tort Law will be used as teaching material in universities and other institutions throughout Europe and elsewhere in order to familiarize future generations of lawyers with each others' legal systems and to assess and facilitate the impact of European supranational legal systems on the development of national laws, and vice versa.

It is not the intention of this work, or of the series as a whole, to unify the existing laws of tort or of the other areas of law that are to be covered. That would not be possible, nor would it be desirable. For indeed, the diversity of European legal systems reflects not only a variety of legal cultures - which are bound to converge in step with European integration - but also and perhaps mostly a variety of value judgments or policy choices which find their expression in the legal systems. In their effort to uncover common roots, the authors do not wish to express any preference for the solution embodied in one or the other legal system, where that would imply endorsing the underlying value judgment over alternative judgments. In the absence of a common European legislature (outside the limited areas for which national competences have been transferred to the European Union), there is indeed no authoritative source, other than national legislation or case law, from which a common understanding as to the fundamental value judgments underlying national law can be derived. Although that should not prevent legal writers from expressing their own personal preferences, we would prefer not to do that, or to do it only exceptionally, in a work like the present one which is intended to inquire into the common core of principles in the national and supranational legal orders existing within the European Union.

Parts of this work were published in 1998 in a separate volume under the title Tort Law: Scope of Protection. The present work is complete. It comprises nine chapters, listed on the left-hand side. The parts published in 1998 are now updated and integrated in the present volume, mainly in Chapter II but also to some extent in Chapters I, III, VI and IX.

All of the material, whether on paper or on the Internet, is listed in the Table of Contents. Materials found on the Internet are indicated with a hyperlink, others are included in the book. All of the material has also been taken into account in drawing up the Comparative Overviews included in the present book. To make referencing possible, all of the material, whether in the book or here, has been numbered consecutively. As with the previous book, the original language version of the translated material - both that included in the book and that available in electronic format - can also be found here.

Selecting and presenting documents from various legal systems are not an easy task and errors will not always have been avoided. For English law, all authors had the benefit of direct input from an English lawyer, thanks to the presence in our team of Jeremy Lever. As for German and French law, Professor Christian von Bar (Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Osnabrück and Director of the Institute of Private International and Comparative Law) and Professor Geneviève Viney (Professor at Paris I, Sorbonne) generously agreed, notwithstanding the heavy workload imposed by their own academic work, to supply advice and comments for which the authors are extremely grateful.

The authors regret very much that, due to lack of time and of human resources, they could not include much material from national legal systems other than the English, French and German legal systems, representing the three major European "legal families", but they have included material from the two European supranational legal orders, that of the European Union and that of the European Convention on Human Rights (however, the documents from the "Nordic" legal family and other national legal orders, including some from outside Europe, which were reproduced in the previous book, remain available on the Internet site of the project). Fortunately this important gap is made good by Professor C. von Bar's work The Common European Law of Torts (see Table of Frequently Cited Works), of which the first volume is available in English and the second will soon be. In that impressive work, numerous references to the legal systems of all EU Member States can be found with regard to all of the subjects treated in the present book (and many more). On this occasion we would also like to draw attention to another magnum opus, Professor R. Zimmermann's The Law of Obligations. Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). The book gives many insights into the origin of the establishment in Europe of a ius commune under the influence of Roman law under which "law professors moves freely from a chair in one country to one in another; the same textbooks were used at Pavia or Bologna as much as at Halle, Alcalà or Oxford..." (at x). It shows how "the 'European' ius commune and the 'English' common law were (and are) not really so radically distinct as is often suggested" (at xi). It provides an illustration of how the past and the future may meet in a newly emerging ius commune, to which the present book wishes to make a modest contribution.

Many have contributed to the preparation and publication of this work (which proved to be a difficult and immense task). The editors, and also the main authors, are the undersigned: Walter van Gerven (Professor, K.U. Leuven and U. Maastricht and King's College, formerly Advocate General at the European Court of Justice), Jeremy Lever, QC (Senior Dean of All Souls College, Oxford University) and Pierre Larouche (Post-Doctoral Researcher, U. Maastricht). They have divided the work between them as follows: Jeremy Lever, apart from monitoring the English materials as to contents, invested considerable energy in relation to the drafting of the English in the sections dealing with non-English systems (albeit that the volume of work was such that a small proportion of the final work could not be reviewed by him). Pierre Larouche is the author of Chapters IV, V and VI and was responsible for the formatting of the book and the Internet site. Walter van Gerven, apart from being responsible for the concept and structure of the project, is the main author of most of the parts published in the previous book (Pierre Larouche being the co-author or author of the other parts) and co-authored and/or supervised the work on the other Chapters in the new book. That has not prevented all three of them of working closely together and supervising, and updating, each other's work.

Others have contributed to one or more chapters: Bart De Temmerman (referendaris at the Belgian Court of Cassation and former Researcher at the K.U. Leuven) is the main author of Chapter VIII, Ignace Claeys (Researcher at the Belgian Research Fund) and Jan Wouters (Professor, K.U. Leuven) have contributed, as co-authors, to Chapters I and III respectively, Sofie Covemaeker (Research Assistant, K.U. Leuven) and Sophie Stijns (Associate Professor, K.U. Leuven) have contributed to Chapter VII. Madeleine Van Rossum (Associate Professor, U. Maastricht) has worked on Chapter IV. Yvonne Salmon (Cambridge) has worked on various chapters, mainly Chapters VII and VIII. As for the previous book, Adriana Alvarez (U. Project Co-ordinator, Maastricht) coordinated much of the work, notwithstanding her own time-consuming commitments in the financial sector. Iris Vervoort (Research Assistant, K.U. Leuven) assisted the editors in the immensely difficult work of preparing the tables and the index and Linda Mees (K.U. Leuven) supplied the logistic support to finalize the materials in due time.

Many helped in preparing translations of the French, German and other non-English material in the book or on the Internet site. Their names are mentioned under each of the translated documents.

The editors are grateful to all those, mentioned and not mentioned above, who provided help in various ways with the preparation of this work and to Richard Hart of Hart Publishing who provided advice and put the book in final shape.

This work has been made possible thanks to continuing financial support from the University of Maastricht and, at the beginning, from the European Commission, and thanks to the no less important moral support from Appie Luermans, Director of the Law Faculty of the U. Maastricht. As appears from the foregoing, substantial personnel support has been supplied by the U. Maastricht and by the K.U. Leuven. The series Casebooks for a Common Law of Europe, of which this book is part, has its home base at METRO, the Maastricht Institute for Transnational Legal Research of the University of Maastricht, which kindly hosts the present site.

The materials have been updated until 1 January 2000 (but exceptionally further developments have been incorporated). A few updates, without any guarantees as to completeness, will be provided here as time allows.


Walter van Gerven
Jeremy Lever
Pierre Larouche