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The ‘Common Core of European Administrative Law’ project, launched six years ago and still ongoing, applies the ground-breaking methodology underpinning the longstanding ‘Common Core of European Private Law’ research. The basic aim of the ‘new’ initiative is that of testing, in action, whether and to what extent the comparative legal method successfully developed under the private law-centred project can be applied to the field of administrative law. This paper highlights the scientific premises and methodological roots of the European administrative law research, as well as its promises and challenges.

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 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 each of 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, and products liability regimes. As such, the book offers an updated and enriched framework for understanding the rules, theories, styles of reasoning, and cultures of tort law across the Atlantic.

Innovation permeates the regulatory policy vision of European Union in the framework of the so-called ‘better regulation’ agenda. Even though both the Council and the Commission recognize the nexus between regulation and innovation, they seem to have different strategies. For the Commission, the need to steer innovation towards certain objectives justifies the introduction of new regulations. For the Council, new regulations should be appraised in terms of their likely impact on innovation. Empirically, we will test whether there are two different approaches by examining evidence from the Conclusions of the Competitiveness Council, think tanks reports on the innovation principle, and the text of the Commission’s regulatory proposals, including impact assessments (IAs), in the field of the Digital agenda of the EU. We find that the Commission is more interested in harnessing innovation towards goals such as ‘socially responsible innovation’ than in deploying tests on whether regulations may have negative effects on innovation. The findings contribute to the literature on EU regulation and innovation, showing how behind a common agenda for digital innovation the institutions of the EU have different approaches.

This essay analyzes critically the existing literature to show how State law tends to control relationships and disputes between people that are strangers to each other because, whenever there is a bond tying together a group of people, such a group tends to have their relationships and disputes controlled by different sets of rules. These “different” rules may have diverse origins (customary, religious, professional), but they are daily relied on by dozens of millions of people; they control U.S. markets worth dozens of billions of USD, and they all serve the purpose of regulating activities, for which State law is perceived by the concerned group as unfit (or, at most, as a second best choice) to meet their needs.

Le agenzie di rating del credito esercitano un’incisiva forza di orientamento delle scelte finanziarie. Dal punto di vista giuridico, le questioni cruciali riguardano l’indipendenza di queste imprese, i loro potenziali conflitti d’interesse, la responsabilità per danni cagionati da rating inaccurati e i fattori di deterrenza utili a prevenire, o limitare l’insorgere di tali danni.

Cet article vise à démontrer que la réponse civiliste au changement des circonstances contractuelles met en exergue, à côté des impératifs de sécurité et stabilité juridique, les valeurs de la justice et solidarité contractuelle, et est la solution qui s’est imposée dans la pratique du commerce international et dans les projets européens d’harmonisation contractuelle, en dépit de l’idée courante selon laquelle les droits du common law seraient plus business-friendly que les droits civilistes.