CIAO DATE: 02/06

A Coordinated Approach to Regulation and Civil Liability in European Law: Rethinking Institutional Complementarities

Abstract

Civil liability is a much older regulatory device than administrative regulation. The emergence of a regulatory state is a relatively new phenomenon. Within regulatory States different modes of regulation and administrative tools have developed, including the extensive use of the private law.

The relationship between civil liability and regulation as devices for risk assessment and risk management has been extensively explored. But new developments in both strategies suggest the need to reconsider their interation in the light of the European framework of legal integration. Historically there have been different modes of interaction between civil liability and administrative regulation. In the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, the emergence of regulation, and in the particular that of the welfare regulation, was primarily due to significant limits of compensation. These shortcomings were associated with the internal structure of civil liability and the weakness of other branches of private law, especially contract and labour law. Worker compensation regimes for industrial accidents are only one example of an emerging body of legislation stimulated by the combined weaknesses of civil liability and labour law. While the causes of the development of administrative regulation are multiple, it is quite clear that in the context (the limits of) civil liability triggered welfare regulation.

Full Text (PDF, 40 pages, 1.79 MB)