Cross-border claims for personal injuries are becoming more common. Furthermore, European nationals increasingly join class actions in the USA. These tendencies have created a need to know more about the law of damages in Europe and America. Despite the growing importance of this subject, there is a dearth of material available to practitioners to assist them in advising their clients as to the heads of damage recoverable in other countries. This book aims to fill that gap by looking at the law in England, Germany and Italy. It sets out the raw data in the wider context of tort law, then provides a closer synthesis, largely concerned with methodological issues, and draws some comparative conclusions.

No abstract

This paper was prompted by the feeling that the differences between the systems under comparison are not as great as they are commonly believed to be and by the knowledge that lawyers in each of these countries tend to have a vague if not distorted picture of each other's laws. The way I have tried to approach my subject has been through the use of statistics so, before I say anything about the differences between the systems, real or apparent, let me make some cautionary remarks.

No abstract

This chapter discusses the tort of deceit. The common-law rules concerning liability for dishonesty were synthesised to create the tort of deceit at the end of the eighteenth century in Pasley v. Freeman, and the tort takes its modern form from the decision of the House of Lords in Derry v. Peek in 1889. Most of the cases concern non-physical damage, that is to say, financial or pure economic loss, although the tort can also extend to cover personal injuries and damage to property. The requirements of liability are as follows: the defendant must make a false statement of existing fact with knowledge of its falsity and with the intention that the claimant should act on it, with the result (4) that the claimant acts on it to his detriment.