Common Law and Civil Law Perspectives on Tort Law

The book provides scholars, lawyers and law students with a comparative overview of the law of civil liability for injuries arising outside of contract in five major legal systems in the common law and civil law traditions: England, the United States, France, Germany and Italy. The book analyzes a select number of foundational issues that lie at the core of tort law in all the jurisdictions surveyed, and takes them as points of comparison for appreciating commonalities and differences between the common law and the civil law traditions, as well as within these traditions. The analysis covers the structure and context of tort law architectures, the role of negligence and the continuum between fault and strict liability, rules on recovery for personal injuries, non-economic losses and for pure economic losses, tests and approaches to causation, medical malpractice and products liability regimes. As such, the book provides an updated and enriched framework for understanding the rules, the theories, the styles of reasoning and the tort law cultures across the Atlantic.