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This essay deals with needs and problems of the initiatives aiming at a legal integration in Europe. In the first part of the paper (II-IV) the need of a wider and deeper knowledge of legal data is stressed by the author through the comparison of (overt) methods and (hidden) implications pursued by research-oriented enterprises — such as "The Common Core Project' or the 'European Case-books Project' - on the one hand, and the initiatives whose goal is the creation of rules — such as the UNIDROIT Principles or the 'Lando Commission' - on the other. The second part of the article (V.-VI.) highlights the reality of multi-level legal systems as one of the most important problems any integrative enterprise has to face. The author's ranking and analysis of the legal layers at work in the European societies — eg: different levels of local customary rules, 'national' rules, tansnational business rules, EU rules — aims at making out, at least, how fully aware a Code or any other authoritative regulation has to be about the kind and level of integration to pursue.

The Study Group on Social Justice in European Private Law are: Gert Bruggemeier (Bremen), Mauro Bussani (Trieste), Hugh Collins (London), Aurelia Colombi Ciacchi (Bremen), Giovanni Comande (Pisa), Muriel Fabre-Magnan (Nantes), Stefan Grundmann (Berlin), Martijn Hesselink (Amsterdam) (Chairman), Christian Joerges (Florence), Brigitta Lurger (Graz), Ugo Mattei (Torino), Marisa Meli (Catania), Jacobien Rutgers (Amsterdam), Christoph Schmidt (Florence), Jane Smith (Bremen), Ruth Sefton-Green (Paris), Horatia Muir Watt (Paris), Thomas Wilhelmsson (Helsinki).

The present chapter focuses on the methodology underlying the ‘Common Core of European Administrative Laws’ project in general, and its first research output on public authorities’ liability in particular. From this perspective, the chapter first introduces the current state of European tort law and the scholarly initiatives focusing on it, before presenting the basic outlines and distinctive features of the ‘Common Core’ approach and the rationale behind the three-level responses, which is one of the distinctive features of the whole project. The chapter thus sheds light on its potential contribution to European debates on public liability and comparative tort law.

This essay presents the framework for new comparative research in the field of administrative law, with a focus on the European legal area. It is divided into two parts. In Part I, we argue that some difficulties that beset the traditional uses of the comparative method are even more evident when considering the field of administrative law. Accordingly, a methodological shift is needed in more than one sense. First, instead of focusing on either similarities or differences between national legal systems, both analogies and differences must be considered. Second, legal comparison, properly intended, differs from a mere juxtaposition of national administrative laws. Third, the overemphasis on legislation is even less justified in the field of administrative law, which calls for careful attention to judicial and institutional practices. In this perspective, we briefly illustrate the methodology grounded in a factual approach that has been developed in the field of comparative private law in the last few decades and the way we are going to apply it into our research on administrative law, viewed through a procedural lens. In Part II we discuss the main pillars that characterize our research concerning administrative law: first, its goal, which is the advancement of knowledge; second, the choice to focus on administrative procedure, instead of judicial review of administrative action; third, the methodology, which combines a synchronic comparison, concerning modern legal systems, with a diachronic comparison, that is to say a retrospective on some aspects of the history of legal institutions that look particularly relevant; and fourth, the choice of the legal systems selected for comparison, including a variety of states and a non-state, the European Union.

Notwithstanding the well-known differences that run through cultures and traditions, the West has never stopped trying to export its own law into the rest of the world. During and after the colonial era similar endeavors were spreading Western views on how legal issues are to be understood and handled, thereby broadening the West’s area of influence on global legal affairs. More recently, these efforts have overlapped with (and have been blurred by the rhetorical veil of) so-called legal globalization. The focus of this Article is on the attitudes and methods underpinning the ongoing Western attempts to transplant the two pillars of Western civilization, i.e., democracy and the rule of law, into outside contexts. Confronted with processes that concern different legal systems, this Article cannot but take a comparative law approach. Such an approach entails a careful consideration of the historical and contextual factors and will enable an analysis of data that are usually either discarded or underrated in mainstream legal debates. Thus notions, ideas, and debates about the rule of law and democracy will be reappraised from a comparative law point of view in order to both unearth their intimate legal foundations and to scrutinize their potential for being transplanted outside Western societies. The analysis will show how this potential, to the extent that it exists, can only be exploited through a radical shift from the usual way in which the West approaches the legal settings it aims to change.

According to the common understanding, tort law is the branch of private law whose set of positive rules, institutions, and procedures aims to shift the costs of accidents from the victim to a different subject. Similar accounts of tort law are widespread and uncontested, yet they fail to do justice to the overall role tort law plays in societies. Tort law does not live in legislatures, law firms, courts, and law books only. It also lives “in the shadow” of the official system of adjudication: in the offices of insurance companies; in people's notions about injury and risk, responsibility and justice; in the languages and images associated with law in mass-generated popular culture; as well as in public debates about what values should be protected and promoted, at what costs, and at the expense of whom. On the assumption that tort law is at the same time a product and a constituent of the very cultural framework in which it is embedded, the aim of this paper is to explore its cultural dimensions in a broad comparative perspective. Combining insights from legal anthropology, socio-legal literature, legal history, and comparative law, the article tries to understand the role that, in Western and non-Western legal traditions, tort law plays in responding to, and managing social conflicts. In this perspective, the paper studies the cultural frameworks that sustain the adjudication process outside and inside the courtrooms, and analyzes how notions, practices, and remedies of tort law “in action” vary across different social and cultural settings. It then puts forward some conclusions about the extent to which tort law notions, ideas, concepts, categorizations, and perceptions influence and, reciprocally, are influenced by the cultural framework of which they are an expression.

Combining insights from legal anthropology, socio-legal literature, legal history, and comparative law, the paper aims to understand the role that, in Western and non-Western legal traditions, tort law plays in responding to and managing social conflicts.

The availability of democracy is usually presented as a pre-requisite of any evaluation – be it political, economic or legal – of any country, and as an imperative to pursue (with or without Western help) for all societies that do not enjoy it. Yet, discussions about non-democratic systems, and the Western aspiration to transform them, often fail to take into account – as they actually should – the basic elements of Western democratic societies, the very fabric with which democracy is woven. The paper adopts a comparative law approach to the issue. It takes into account the historical, technical, and cultural frameworks underlying Western democracies, and unveils the limits of the arguments usually employed by both the detractors of democracy itself, and those who believe that democracy is an easy-to-export commodity.

The paper claims that ‘mixity’ is an inherent quality of almost any legal systems, and not only of those that, for historical reasons, inherited legal features from the civil and common law traditions. From this ‘pluralistic’ point of view, all the experiences where Western legal models interact among themselves, or with religious, indigenous or customary laws, deserve to be included into the ‘mixed’ category. Such an approach reveals itself as a powerful cognitive tool to advance comparative knowledge about legal systems. In particular, it enables one to better understand: (a) the dynamism of any given legal system – be it national, sub-, or supra-national –; (b) the driving forces behind the penetration of ‘foreign’ elements in a given legal experience; and (c) the reasons for which there are variable degrees of resistance and/or resilience amidst the different layers a legal system is made of.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) have come under open criticism in the public and legal debates. The picture that has broken surface is one in which CRAs ended up compromising the quality of their activities in order to facilitate the selling of services, and snatch or defend market shares. Nevertheless, in the US and in Europe the regulatory approaches content themselves with focusing on the same administrative tools that have so far proved to be largely ineffective. This is why scholars and opinion-makers have started questioning the current accountability regimes for CRAs, and the reasonableness of keeping the private for-profit nature of the agencies, instead of straightforwardly transforming them into public bodies. But the answers about the optimal nature of, and the most appropriate accountability model for the agencies may only come from considering a different perspective, which puts in place, not a national/regional plan aimed to fence off local misbehavior, but a global strategy to ensure worldwide effective accountability for CRAs. In this direction, the issue can be tackled under either a centralized-political, or a decentralized-judicial point of view.

The aims, methods, key aspects and features of the research carried out by the 'Common Core of European Private Law' project in the field of tort law are discussed. The distinctive tenets of the Common Core approach as applied to tort law issues and the scenarios that such an approach is bound to open are highlighted.

Law and economics shows that a key factor in determining the optimal economic loss rule is found in the relationship between pure economic loss and social loss. Economic loss should be compensable in torts only to the extent that it corresponds to a socially relevant loss. In this paper We undertake a comparative evaluation of the economic loss rule to verify whether modern legal systems, although not formally adopting the economic criterion, define the exclusionary rule in light of efficiency considerations. The comparative analysis reveals that the substantive applications of the economic loss rule in European jurisdictions are consistent with the predicates of economic analysis. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc.