The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms? efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the...

This paper assesses the widely held belief that damages for pain and suffering are random or arbitrary. We empirically analyze the differential impact of a plaintiff's personal characteristics, pain-specific circumstances and a lawsuit's procedural features on such payments. Relying on a dataset...

The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms? efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the...

This paper provides a framework to evaluate human life based on civil court decisions on damages for pain and suffering. Using judgements from Germany and Austria over the last 25 years, we calculate an average Value of Damages for Pain and Suffering (VDPS) of about EUR 1.79 millions, with a...

Despite the advances in New Institutional Economics about the economic consequences of institutions and legal rules, up to now we have only limited knowledge about the mechanisms of the evolution of law. By combining the main ideas of Evolutionary Economics and New Institutional Economics this...

Based on interviews of all UK based third party litigation funders the paper provides new empirical evidence on the nature, extent and type of third party funding of litigation. It also examines the emergence of new group or class action third party funders in Europe focused primarily on...

With the case of Lliuya v. RWE, climate change litigation has come to Germany. The article explores the German law of torts or delict, asking whether it has something to offer to victims of climate change. The essential elements of negligence liability, i.e. scope of protection, duty of care,...

Informed consent in German medical law has a long and controversial tradition. For more than 100 years, medical treatment – even where medically indicated and performed under medical standards – constitutes an act of personal injury and therefore requires the patient’s consent. The basis...

This article discusses the German Federal Supreme Court decision in Bundesgerichtshof (Google Autocomplete) (VI ZR 269/12) on whether Google was responsible for the publication of results generated by the "autocomplete" function of its search engine that made defamatory suggestions about the...

This paper has been composed within the framework of the ‘Shifts in Governance’ project, financed by the Netherlands Association for Scientific Research (NWO). It contains an impression of first empirical data that was collected on industrial accidents and occupational diseases in four...