TORT LAW: AN AREA WITH MANY BORDERLINES

This book is the third in a new series inaugurated in 2016 entitled ‘Principles of European Tort Law’. As in the two previous books, it aims to reflect on certain aspects that were not subject to specific and detailed treatment throughout the 10 volumes that served as the basis for the elaboration of the ‘Principles of European Tort Law (PETL)’ in 2005. Together with the already existing volumes, as well as the volumes to come, it should contribute to a revised edition of the PETL which, if time and energy permit, should see the light of day within the next decade.

By contrast to other soft law projects, the PETL strive to delimit the area of extracontractual liability, but make no specific effort to trace its borderlines with other branches of the law of obligations – such as contractual liability, unjust enrichment or negotiorum gestio – or with other branches of the law, either public (for instance, in some countries, the liability of public authorities) or private (notably, also in some countries, liability for damage arising in the context of family relationships).

A first caveat to this book is that it does not deal with all the possible borderlines of tort law, but only with its interaction with contract law. When the Group first met in Graz in April 2013 to discuss the borderlines issue, the original proposal embraced most of the abovementioned borderlines in a single Project. However, the vast majority of the members of the Group rightly pointed out that, although the project was very attractive, it was hardly feasible as a single Project, and that it was better to concentrate first on an area where border frictions were: more common, i.e. happened in most of the countries under survey; important, i.e. had a greater complexity and practical importance; and that were also more frequent. The obvious candidate was then the borderlines between contract and tort and a new draft questionnaire was presented in October 2013 in Girona and submitted to discussion by the Group.

I must confess that at first I was quite reluctant to confine the object of analysis to the border area between tort and contract, since I thought it was not as unexplored as some other areas.