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.
European Intermediary Liability in Copyright. A Tort-Based Analysis
With the adoption and subsequent national implementation of the E-Commerce Directive’s safe harbour regime, the architecture set up in Europe for the civil liability of internet intermediaries for the copyright infringements of others has become two-tiered: at a first stage, it is necessary to examine whether a given intermediary attracts, in its pursuit of a certain activity, liability according to the standards ensconced in the Member States’ legislation. If so, in the second instance, the applicability of a safe harbour must be considered. As a result, although it provides a veneer of approximation by immunising intermediaries under certain circumscribed conditions, the Directive does not harmonise the underlying substantive liability norms which determine whether the safe harbours will be necessary or redundant. This leaves ample room for national divergences beyond the safe harbours. The resultant fragmentation strikes a discordant note in the otherwise highly harmonised area of copyright. This book seeks to explore the possibilities for moving EU law forward towards a fully harmonised intermediary liability system in copyright. To this end, after a detailed dissection of the current European rules, it undertakes a comparative analysis of the national regimes in place in three EU Member States, those of England, France and Germany. Subsequently, the relationship between these rules and the national substantive tort principles that underlie them is examined. Ultimately, the book works its way towards proposing a model harmonised framework to govern the area: a truly substantive, truly European comprehensive, cogent, stable and effective analytical structure for intermediary accessory copyright liability.
Translating Legal Language and Comparative Law
Legal texts are in the focus of both lawyers and translators. This paper discusses the binary opposition of these two views especially in the light of contract law. There is one crucial epistemic difference between the point of view of the translator and the lawyer when it comes to the interpretation of legal texts. In the translator’s view legal text is traditionally conceived as static as to its nature; something that already exists in the form of text. Traditionally, the translator is interested in the text itself as it was written down in a document, i.e. the translator needs to go back to the frozen moment when a legal document was constructed and finalised. The lawyer, in contrast, is very much interested not only in the text of the legal document but also in the contextual surroundings of the text. In fact, for legal interpretation, sometimes the key-elements for the interpretation come from outside of the text itself. This paper concludes that legal translation is in many cases closer to transcreation than it is to traditionally understood translation.