4 - Re-norming Tort Law

Summary

If Chapter 3 situated the problems facing contemporary tort law within EU law, it did not provide a comprehensive or novel model of liability. In Chapter 4, the key argument is that network liability in its incipient form can be detected in the law on 'private' gatekeepers of product liability, and this model can and should be applied equally to the state through reimagining Francovich liability. This move will also assist in developing the liability criteria, and the concept of a sufficient serious breach of EU law offers a coherent and normatively principled standard for the liability of secondary actors in public/private governance networks. It is then underlined that different existing models of liability should be understood as different means of recovery in networks. The central point is that these three models of liability – individual, organisational and network – should be placed within a more encompassing normative concept of network responsibility. This model of responsibility can, and should, be applied beyond the context of product liability as a template for solving problems of attribution and imputation in governance networks. The idea is tested in the context of value chain liability.