Our projects

As part of the Annual Conference on European Tort Law(ACET), the latest developments in tort law in the various legal systems are presented, discussed and analysed in comparative law. The national presentations are based on detailed country reports written by academics from the respective legal systems and published together with a comparative law report in the "European Tort Law Yearbook". In addition to the member states of the European Union (with the exception of Luxembourg), Norway, Switzerland and Israel are also represented. The national reports will be complemented by a comparative law report and a presentation of developments at European level. Each year, the conference also includes a comparative analysis of a new specialised topic in tort law.

The "23rd Annual Conference on European Tort Law. Essential information on court practice and legislation in the area of tort law in 2023" took place on 4/5 April 2024 in the Festsaal of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Comprehensive country reports will be published in the yearbook "European Tort Law 2023" (autumn 2024 by De Gruyter) and the key court decisions have been made available free of charge in the globally unique "Eurotort" database.

The topic of this year's special session was product liability. The results of these special sessions were published in a special volume of the Journal of European Tort Law (JETL), issue 2/2024, 107-172 (guest editor: Barbara C Steininger). The 24th Annual Conference on European Tort Law will take place on 24/25 April 2025.

The ESR endeavours to maintain a global discourse through international cooperation. The Sino-European Private Law Forum, which was founded in 2001 together with Yantai University, where the director of the ESR has also been a visiting professor since 2016, serves to promote dialogue with the Chinese legal system. Publication of the most recent anthology "Fault-based and strict liability" produced as part of the Sino-European Private Law Forum is planned for autumn 2024. A cooperation with the World Tort Law Society (WTLS), which was founded in 2012 by Renmin University, one of China's leading law faculties, together with the ESR and the European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law (ECTIL) and with the support of members of the American Law Institute (ALI), serves the general dialogue with non-European countries. The WTLS comprises 30 renowned researchers from all over the world; the Director of the ESR is a member of its Executive Committee.

The public debate on the legal and moral responsibility for the use of artificial intelligence is also being accompanied by the ESR, with liability for damage caused by AI taking centre stage. The Director of the Institute was a member of the "Expert Group on New Technologies" set up by the European Commission, which has since presented its final report. The most important milestone in this field of research was the publication of an expert opinion commissioned by the European Commission: M.A. Geistfeld/E. Karner/B.A. Koch/C Wendehorst (eds.), Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence and Software, Berlin: De Gruyter (2023) 407 p. In addition, the following special issue on the new Product Liability Directive was published in JTEL : Product Liability (guest editor: Barbara C Steininger). The AI focus will continue to be pursued and deepened in the future, whereby developments at European level in particular will be monitored and scientifically accompanied by publications. The Director of the ESR is also a member of the working group set up at the BMJ to assess the AI guideline proposals.

A three-year project is analysing how the duty of care of hospitals changes as a result of limited financial resources. The focus is on the allocation of resources by doctors and hospital management and the associated legal and ethical implications. The legal analysis is not limited to civil law, but also includes aspects of public law, criminal law, legal ethics and legal economics; in addition, project members from medical practice have been recruited. The interdisciplinary project is being led by the Director of the ESR together with medical law expert Prof Stöger, University of Vienna, and was launched in 2023 with the preparation and submission of the questionnaire to the international project team.

The production of goods and the extraction of raw materials often takes place in countries of the global South, where social and environmental standards are regularly low. This leads to collateral damage through human rights violations and environmental damage. In various European legal systems, attempts are being made both in court and at the legislative level to improve this situation by means of liability law. The Institute has already laid the foundations for addressing the problems of distribution chains with a monograph on the general network of legal relationships between customers, retailers and manufacturers: H. Koziol, Mehrstufiger Warenverkehr, Vienna: Jan Sramek (2021) 317 pp. Against the background of some uncertainties regarding the implementation of an EU directive in this regard, project preparations have been delayed. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive is now expected to be adopted in 2024, on the basis of which the particularly topical and socio-politically significant problem of human rights violations in global supply chains will be examined as part of a separate project. In 2023, preparatory work was carried out for a conference on the topic on 18 October 2024 in Graz in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights.

This fourth project in the "Digest of European Tort Law" series analyses the topic of "limitations of liability" in a comprehensive comparative law analysis on the basis of supreme court decisions from 27 European legal systems (almost all EU Member States and selected non-EU Member States) and judgments of the European Court of Justice. The research is supplemented by a legal history report and a comparison with existing harmonisation drafts. Like the first three Digesten volumes, which were devoted to the topics of "natural causation", "damage" and unlawfulness and fault (summarised under the generic term "misconduct"), this volume is also intended to contribute to a better understanding and harmonisation of tort law in Europe.

Like the previous three Digesten projects, the Digesten IV study is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (P 33095-G); the ESR's funding application was approved by the FWF in November 2019. As with Volume III, the research on Digesten IV is also being led by Ernst Karner (ESR, ECTIL and University of Vienna). In addition to Ernst Karner, the coordination group includes the following internationally recognised and renowned tort lawyers Bjarte Askeland (Court of Appeal, Bergen), Elena Bargelli (University of Pisa), Martin A Hogg (National University of Ireland Galway) and Bénédict Winiger (University of Geneva). The project is being supervised scientifically at the ESR and - in cooperation with the University of Geneva - organisationally.

As with the Digest Studies I-III, the results of this research will be published in the "Digest of European Tort Law" series by De Gruyter (Berlin/Boston). As the completion of some jurisdiction reports was also delayed for reasons beyond the control of the authors concerned, the FWF granted a cost-neutral extension of the project duration until the end of 2023, enabling the remaining country reports to be completed on time. In addition, all comparative reports were prepared: in one report, the results from the country reports were compared with the Principles of European Tort Law (PETL) and the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR); in other reports, the results in the country reports were compared for each question in the questionnaire. The publication will appear in 2024.

With the Eurotort-Database, the ESR operates a unique research tool that makes the most important court decisions on tort law from all EU member states available free of charge in English. As liability law in the European Union is only partially harmonised, the collection of national court decisions is of great importance for the further development of European tort law. A relaunch of the database, which currently contains more than 5,000 decisions from 30 legal systems, is necessary to prevent irretrievable loss of data and to make it even easier and more intuitive to use. The necessary work, which is being carried out in cooperation with the ACDH-CH of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, began in 2023 and should be completed by the end of 2025.

Legal systems assign goods (such as life and health, property, personal freedom, rights of claim) to persons. Project leader Helmut Koziol (ESR, ECTIL) is conducting a monograph on the content and scope of the allocations, the necessary protective instruments that are reasonable for third parties (such as rights of defence, claims for damages and enrichment, criminal sanctions) provided by the legal system, as well as any gaps in protection and contradictions in the property protection system. In 2023, a draft of the monograph was prepared and discussed internally. The monograph was published in 2024 by Jan Sramek, Vienna.

As part of this research project conducted by ESR in collaboration with ECTIL and Nationalparks Austria, Ernst Karner is investigating the liability for trees and forests, which has increasingly come into focus in recent years - particularly with regard to protecting the environment and combating the climate crisis. Through differentiated tree hazard management, the focus of the study is particularly on the conflicting objectives in the national park laws - namely, on the one hand, the preservation of valuable nature conservation landscapes as untouched as possible and, on the other hand, the educational purpose and the terrain-related objectives (which also require certain security measures) - which must be harmonised with each other as optimally as possible. This study consists of three parts: firstly, a concept from an arboricultural point of view drawn up by Karoline Zsak, a leading employee of the Donau-Auen National Parks; secondly, a comprehensive legal assessment of this concept by Ernst Karner; and thirdly, an overview of the most important court judgements by Karl-Heinz Danzl (Hon-Prof Innsbruck, former President of the 2nd Senate of the Supreme Court).

The study was published jointly with Nationalparks Austria in a German-language publication (authors: Ernst Karner/Karoline Zsak; Baumgefahrenmanagement in österreichischen Nationalparks; 159 pp) in 2023 by Jan Sramek Verlag (Vienna) and thus made available to a wider audience. On 18 October 2022, Ernst Karner also presented the latest research findings at the 15th ZVR Traffic Law Day. In two presentations, he dealt with liability in urban areas, forests and nature reserves. The results were published in the ZVR special issue 1a/2023, 67 ff.

ESR and ECTIL organised the 19th Joint Seminar of the International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association) and the European Association of Law and Economics (EALE) on "Pandemics - Liability and Insurance". The project was led by Ernst Karner (ESR, ECTIL and University of Vienna), Christophe Courbage (Geneva School of Business Administration) and Michael Faure (METRO, Erasmus University Rotterdam). The presentations at this seminar focussed on the liability implications of pandemics for the (re)insurance industry. In February 2022, 13 abstracts were selected and their authors were invited to present comprehensive papers at the seminar. The papers were submitted in spring 2022 and the seminar took place from 23 to 24 June 2022 in Vienna. A selection of the papers presented at the event was published in a special issue of "Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance - Issues and Practice" by Palgrave (London) in 2023.