Revisiting the Real Scope of the Obligation to Compensate for Harm to Health: The Way to Individualization of Tort Liability?

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the problem of determining the real scope of tort liability for harm caused to health in the context of the mutual influence of the relevant legal design and alternative compensation forms, as well as an attempt to reconsider detected imbalances from the standpoint of existing, traditional and innovative theoretical concepts. It is established that modern legislation and practice leads to inconsistent use of recourse and quasi-recourse rights of claims for the purpose of holding liable a direct causer of physical harm and (or) expanding the scope of such liability, which requires justification of the conceptual principles of the adopted approach, allowing to narrow all cases of this kind to a single system. It is noted that the relations concerning compensation for harm to health provide extensive ground for discussing individualizing educational and preventive principles of tort liability, not related to the use of such a means of protecting a violated right as compensation for moral harm, which is caused by the conditional nature of the list of losses and costs provided for in paragraph 1 of Article 1085 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, by the existence of alternative ways to assess physical harm, implemented in special types of insurance and by the lack of a unified system for determining the consequences of causing damage to health and other factors. The author proposes the mechanism of objectification in the norms of civil law of the corresponding doctrinal decision applicable in combination with the current legal regulation of insurance means of compensation, constructions of liability for third parties and liability regardless of fault. Implementation of this proposal also requires departure from the restrictive method of determining the amount and nature of the harm caused to health to be compensated based on the norms of social security law and to make necessary amendments to Section 2 of Chapter 59 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation.