Making European Tort Law: The Game and its Players
In the last decades, building a common European tort law has become a primary goal for many European institutions and research groups. On the one hand, EU institutions frequently highlight the need of simplifying the current diversity in European tort law, and try to achieve this goal injecting the European legal framework with (so far quite incoherent) pieces of legislation. On the other hand, many research groups aim to enhance the Europanization process through means that are much differentiated one to the other. Some of these groups (like the European Group on Tort Law and the Study Group on a European Civil Code) adopt a top-down approach, and seek to draft a ‘soft’ European tort law. Others (e.g. the ‘Ius Commune Casebook for a Common Law of Europe’ project and the ‘Common Core of European Private Law’ project) follow a bottom-up path, committed as they are to develop a better knowledge on tort law across the European law-users. Despite the number and the qualities of such enterprises, there is no agreement on what should be done nor on who should do it. It is from this debate that the paper takes off, aiming to offer an overview of the endeavours currently under way, of the different techniques and methodologies they adopt, and of the possible outcomes that they are likely to produce in the short run as well as in the long run.
CODIFICATION, CONSOLIDATION, RESTATEMENT? HOW BEST TO SYSTEMISE THE MODERN LAW OF TORT
Abstract The law of tort (or extra or non-contractual liability) has been criticised for being imprecise and lacking coherence. Legal systems have sought to systemise its rules in a number of ways. While civil law systems generally place tort law in a civil code, common law systems have favoured case-law development supported by limited statutory intervention consolidating existing legal rules. In both systems, case law plays a significant role in maintaining the flexibility and adaptability of the law. This article will examine, comparatively, different means of systemising the law of tort, contrasting civil law codification (taking the example of recent French proposals to update the tort provisions of the Code civil) with common law statutory consolidation and case-law intervention (using examples taken from English and Australian law). In examining the degree to which these formal means of systemisation are capable of improving the accessibility, intelligibility, clarity and predictability of the law of tort, it will also address the role played by informal sources, be they ambitious restatements of law or other means. It will be argued that given the nature of tort law, at best, any form of systemisation (be it formal or informal) can only seek to minimise any lack of precision and coherence. However, as this comparative study shows, further steps are needed, both in updating outdated codal provisions and rethinking the type of legal scholarship that might best assist the courts.
Detection and Counting of On-Tree Citrus Fruit for Crop Yield Estimation
In this paper, we present a technique to estimate citrus fruit yield from the tree images. Manually counting the fruit for yield estimation for marketing and other managerial tasks is time consuming and requires human resources, which do not always come cheap. Different approaches have been used for the said purpose, yet separation of fruit from its background poses challenges, and renders the exercise inaccurate. In this paper, we use k-means segmentation for recognition of fruit, which segments the image accurately thus enabling more accurate yield estimation. We created a dataset containing 83 tree images with 4001 citrus fruits from three different fields. We are able to detect the on-tree fruits with an accuracy of 91.3%. In addition, we find a strong correlation between the manual and the automated fruit count by getting coefficients of determination R2 up to 0.99.