Marta Infantino

The Common Core Sound: Short Notes on Themes, Harmonies and Disharmonies of European Tort Law

The goal of the paper is to present aims, methods and features of the research carried out by the ‘The Common Core of European Private Law” project as far as tort law is concerned. Accordingly, the paper first depicts the immediate and the long-term goals of the ‘Common Core’ endeavor, as well as its methodology and organization. The article then illustrates the tort law volumes that have been so far published within the project, and analyzes the distinctive tenets of the Common Core approach as applied to tort law issues. Finally, the paper puts forward some remarks about the scenarios that the Common Core approach is bound to open within the field of tort law, in the short as well as in the long run.

Tort Law and Legal Cultures

According to the common understanding, tort law is the branch of private law whose set of positive rules, institutions, and procedures aims to shift the costs of accidents from the victim to a different subject. Similar accounts of tort law are widespread and uncontested, yet they fail to do justice to the overall role tort law plays in societies. Tort law does not live in legislatures, law firms, courts, and law books only. It also lives “in the shadow” of the official system of adjudication: in the offices of insurance companies; in peoples notions about injury and risk, responsibility and justice; in the languages and images associated with law in mass-generated popular culture; as well as in public debates about what values should be protected and promoted, at what costs, and at the expense of whom. On the assumption that tort law is at the same time a product and a constituent of the very cultural framework in which it is embedded, the aim of this paper is to explore its cultural dimensions in a broad comparative perspective. Combining insights from legal anthropology, socio-legal literature, legal history, and comparative law, the article tries to understand the role that, in Western and non-Western legal traditions, tort law plays in responding to, and managing social conflicts. In this perspective, the paper studies the cultural frameworks that sustain the adjudication process outside and inside the courtrooms, and analyzes how notions, practices, and remedies of tort law “in action” vary across different social and cultural settings. It then puts forward some conclusions about the extent to which tort law notions, ideas, concepts, categorizations, and perceptions influence and, reciprocally, are influenced by the cultural framework of which they are an expression.

Comparative Law in the Global Context - Exploring the Pluralism of Human Rights Indicators

This paper aims to explore what role comparative law can play in the study of global human rights indicators. Global human rights indicators are created within institutional frameworks, and used for purposes that diverge significantly from one another. Indicators differ in their internal structures, in the networks of the actors making them, and in the uses to which they lend themselves. The potential of comparative law with regard to these indicators goes beyond the mere caution against the risks of misinterpretation of legal cultures confronted with the international human rights discourse. Comparative law lenses help, among other things, to see through the macrocosm of global indicators, highlighting patterns of convergence and divergence that are relevant to global governance and might otherwise go under-appreciated.

Human Rights Indicators across Institutional Regimes

This paper aims to investigate what human rights indicators are, and what role they play within international organizations. In particular, this paper argues that human rights indicators, far from having similar structures and posing similar problems, are created and live within frameworks, through processes, and for purposes that might significantly diverge from indicator to indicator. The central claim is that the pluralism underlying the world of human rights indicators reflects, among other things, the variable structures, objectives and modes of operation of the international organizations inhabiting that world. This paper thus explores how the massive production and extensive use of human rights indicators in recent years has not only been influenced by, but has also shaped, the missions, internal structures and operational practices of the international organizations that produce and use them.