Simon Whittaker

Liability for Products

English Law, French Law, and European Harmonisation

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The EU has been active in attempting to harmonize the laws of product liability and sale of goods to consumers, with the aim of promoting fair competition, developing the internal market, and protecting consumers. But how do the resulting laws relate to existing national laws of liability and compensation? Is the resulting harmonization genuine or merely formal? Has implementation of the EC directives changed the law, but left claimants and defendants as differently treated as
ever in different Member States?
This comparative study considers the French and English laws governing all those who may be liable for products: their producers, their suppliers, their users and their regulators. To do so, it examines in each system the private law of tort and contract and aspects of the civil process which are important in determining liability; the administrative law concerning failures to regulate or control product safety; and the liability for products of suppliers of public services, such as water
or healthcare. It considers how the substantive criminal offences affecting product safety, whether particular to products or under more general law, relate to civil liability or to compensation. The emerging picture reveals two complex and significantly different patterns of liability for
products in the English and French systems, cutting across the traditional boundaries of private law, public law and criminal law.
Implementation of the Product Liability Directive and Consumer Guarantees Directive required the insertion into these patterns of new elements, disharmonious with existing wider legal strategies and techniques. This study considers various problems of these directives' implementation in the French and English systems, the main issues of their proper interpretation, and the relationship of the new laws which they create with existing bases of liability. It explains the different
significances given to 'fault,' 'negligence' and 'defect' (whether of safety or of contractual conformity); the relationship between judicial institutions and legal procedures in the determination of substantive legal issues; and the different relationships in the two laws studied between public and private,
civil and criminal law. It concludes by offering wider comments on legal harmonisation based on the French and English experience in relation to these two directives.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 752
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Dezember 2005
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 241mm x 166mm x 46mm
• Gewicht: 1270g
• ISBN-13: 9780198256137
• ISBN-10: 0198256132
• Artikelnr.: 14254184

Autorenporträt

Simon Whittaker is Fellow and Tutor in Law at St. John's College, and Reader in European Comparative Law at the University of Oxford.

Inhaltsangabe

* Preface
* Introduction
* Preliminary
* 1: General Introduction
* Part I Civil Liability in Respect of the Manufacture, Supply or Use
of Products Apart From Implementation of the EC Directives
* 2: Introduction to Private and Public Liability in French Law
* 3: Droit Privé: Delictual Liability for Fault and for the 'Deeds of
Things'
* 4: Droit Privé: the Law of Sale
* 5: Droit Privé: Liability for the Provision of Services Involving
Products
* 6: Droit Administratif and Liability for Products
* 7: Public Services, Service Public, and Liability for Products
* 8: Introduction to Private and Public Liability in English Law
* 9: The Tort of Negligence, its Adjudication, and its Satellites
* 10: The English Law Sale of Goods
* 11: The English Law Governing Public Service, Private Services, and
Liability for Products
* PART 2 Administrative Liability for Failure to Regulate or Control
Product Safety
* 12: French Law: Formal Bases of Liability and Practical
'Irresponsibility'
* 13: English Law: Recurrent Themes and Endemic Casuistry
* PART 3 Criminal Responsibility for Unsafe Products and its
Relationship to Compensation
* 14: Fraudes, Homicides, and the Role of the Partie Civile
* 15: English Law: Crime, the Criminal Process, and 'Essentially Civil
Claims'
* PART 4 The EC Product Liability and the Consumer Guarantees
Directives and their Implementation in French and English Law
* 16: The Creation and Maintenance of the EEC Directive on Liability
for Defective Products and the Process of its Implementation in the
UK and France
* 17: A Closer Look at the Product Liability Directive
* 18: The Patterns of Liability
* 19: The Consumer Guarantees Directive and its Implementation in
French and English Law
* PART 5 General Conclusion
* 20: General Conclusion