Goal of the Questionnaire

Background to the project and methodological remarks

The project forms part of the comprehensive comparative project entitled The Common Core of European Private Law, based in Trento, Italy. The work, started in 1999, seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of the private law aspects of environmental liability in fourteen jurisdictions from thirteen European countries. The original intent was to cover each of the – at the time when the project was conceived – fifteen Member States of the European Union, but it became apparent that it was impossible to find reporters from Denmark and Luxembourg. The participants in the project, mostly academics and some practitioners with a strong academic background, were selected according to their expertise in the field of the private environmental liability law of their home country. When reading the reports, it is obvious that the results differ, from very scholarly and sophisticated reports to rather short and pragmatic answers, thus reflecting not only the individual approach of the reporter but also the different legal traditions of the countries covered by the project.

The project applies the methodology of the Common Core project as a whole. It follows a strict analytical perspective with the goal of describing the existing law without the intention of qualifying the national solutions from a certain perspective. It was thus not intended to assess the national jurisdictions in terms of environmental protection standards or to achieve further harmonisation in this field of law.