Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

1981

Abstract

The choice of "product liability" as a topic for the Tenth International Congress of Comparative Law was most appropriate. At the present time the legal periodicals are full of articles on this topic, the courts (not only in the United States) are handling an increasing load of these cases, the First World Congress on Product Liability has been held (London, 1977), and unification and harmonization work is already well advanced.

At the time of the First International Comparative Law Congress in 1934 it would have been hard to predict the development of this area of the law out of the traditional tort and contract doctrines. While the industrial revolution seemed to be afait accompli, the full impact on the lives of individuals of the goods it produced was just beginning to be felt. This report will try to give an overview of how this field has developed and look at the problems and prospects of the immediate future. The rapid pace of development and the abundance of legal writing make a comprehensive "general report" on this subject, however, an unrealistic project. In some countries the field of law is already too well developed to permit even a superficial survey. Of course, in others the cases are just beginning to challenge traditional doctrine, and it is therefore difficult to say just what the law is. In these countries, many of whom are not represented by national reports, where the legal system has not yet come to grips at all with these problems, the most useful report would be one which took as its focus the direction product liability law should take in the future.

With this in mind, as general reporter I have tried to steer a middle course. I received twenty-one excellent national reports dealing with Argentina, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, England, Ethiopia, Federal Republic of Germany, France, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Quebec, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, and a special report on European unification. (A report on Austrian law was received at the Congress. I have included in Appendix information as to where some of these reports have been published but in the body of this report I refer to the preliminary national reports by country and page. The names and addresses af all the reporters are listed in Appendix F.) These reports and their voluminous references to decisions and legal literature in the various countries make it unnecessary to restate here in survey form the laws of those countries. Rather, I have tried to pick out problems and diversities in the development of the law as they described it, and to make this report principally a basis for discussion of these topics. It is my hope that our general session in Budapest will produce observations and conclusions which can then be included in the final version of this report.

As a basis for our discussion I have also included as appendices some case and statute material. The cases are designed to illustrate some of the troublesome problems courts and legal writers have had to deal with in the elaboration of the law to date. The "statutory" material consists of two of the major harmonization proposals in this area, the Strasbourg Convention on Products Liability and the proposal to the Council of the European Communities for a directive relating to approximation of laws in this field. These proposals are of major significance in themselves, but will also, no doubt, serve as moqels for other legislation in this field in years to come at the national or international level. For our purposes they also can serve to focus our necessarily brief discussion of this complex field by giving a coherent skeleton outline to which we can all refer.

Comments

Reprinted from General Reports to the Tenth International Congress of Comparative Law, edited by Zoltán Péteri and Vanda Lamm, with permission of Kluwer Law International.

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