This paper presents a commentary on a judgment delivered by one of the Courts of Appeal of the city of Córdoba, in the context of a claim for damages arising from a traffic accident. In this case, the court was called upon to determine whether to uphold or, on the contrary, to overturn the first-instance decision, which had fully admitted the claim and ordered the defendant and the insurer joined to the proceedings to pay various heads of damages, including compensation for the “loss of vital capacity” suffered by the claimant. The analysis focuses specifically on this latter aspect, as it provides a valuable opportunity to revisit key concepts in the field of tort law and to re-examine the criteria developed regarding this type of compensation. Furthermore, the case brings to mind the reasoning and principles set forth in the well-known “Dutto” precedent, which—some years ago—played a significant role in unifying judicial doctrine on the matter.

The paper analyses the evidentiary function of psychiatric expertise in tort proceedings, emphasizing its significance within Slovenian contractual and non-contractual liability regimes. Psychiatric experts are essential in establishing causation and assessing the extent of non-pecuniary damage, thereby shaping judicial determinations of fault and compensation. Effective adjudication requires reciprocal legal-medical literacy: judges should understand the basics of psychiatric evaluation, while experts must grasp fundamental tort and procedural principles. The study highlights the need for unified psychiatric assessment criteria consistent with established jurisprudential standards to enhance legal certainty, coherence, and fairness in the quantification of damages within tort law. Such harmonisation would strengthen the consistency and predictability of judicial practice.

Abstract The growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-based brain–computer interface (BCI) systems into healthcare intensifies a fundamental legal question: who should bear responsibility for damage caused by adaptive technologies that directly interact with the human brain? Whilst the European Union’s new Product Liability Directive (2024/2853) represents a significant step towards modernising liability for digital products, it remains largely oriented towards identifiable technical defects and relatively stable products. This article examines AI-driven BCI systems through the lens of algorithmic normativity and introduces the concept of a Reflexive Normative Cascade to analyse how responsibility evolves from pre-legal normative expectations to societal experiential feedback and, potentially, to reactive legal crystallisation. It argues that although societal experience clearly articulates concerns relating to autonomy, mental integrity, and transparency, these insights are not always successfully translated into stable liability rules under the current product liability framework. In particular, damages arising from normative design choices embedded in algorithms, continuous post-market adaptation, and distributed responsibility chains expose persistent accountability gaps for both injured parties and producers. By situating the Product Liability Directive within this reflexive process, the article contends that liability for AI-driven BCIs cannot be fully addressed through static doctrinal tools alone and calls for a dynamic normative framework integrating transparency, traceability, and complementary insurance mechanisms.

Abstract Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has emerged as a promising research topic in the legal domain, aiming to assist decision-making processes by predicting judicial outcomes. In the COLIEE 2025 shared task, a new pilot subtask named LJPJT 2025 was introduced, focusing on Japanese civil tort cases. This subtask consists of two binary classification tasks: Tort Prediction (TP) and Rationale Extraction (RE). In the first part of this paper, we propose a simple fine-tuned ModernBERT-based system for LJPJT 2025, which achieved competitive results, including the highest F1 score among all participants in the RE task and a top-ranked performance in the TP task. In addition to these two classification tasks, we further present an exploratory information extraction task that aims to automatically extract textual segments corresponding to the plaintiff’s or defendant’s claims and the alleged tort instances from raw judgment document. This task is designed to automate the annotation process that has so far relied entirely on manual efforts in previous studies. In contrast to the strong results obtained in the TP and RE tasks, our baseline experiments on this new information extraction task revealed considerably lower performance, highlighting the substantial challenges that remain for achieving end-to-end judgment prediction directly from raw judgment document.

Around the world, women and girls are being victimized by pornographic deepfakes— alarmingly convincing, sexually exploitative images and videos generated using artificial intelligence (AI). Facing statutory gaps, victims may turn to traditional tort law claims to recover for the injuries inflicted by pornographic deepfakes. Defamation law, which protects against reputational injuries caused by false statements, is a particularly compelling arena for vindicating the interests invaded by a pornographic deepfake—interests which are, at their heart, social and reputational. Fortunately for deepfake victims, a pornographic deepfake will often satisfy defamation’s basic elements: A false and defamatory communication that concerns the victim and is published to third parties. A communication is defamatory if it would tend to harm its subject’s reputation in the eyes of the community, which is plainly true of pornographic deepfakes. But normative considerations sometimes complicate straightforward defamation claims. When deciding whether a communication is defamatory, courts may ask not only whether a communication would harm its subject’s reputation in the eyes of the community, but also whether it should. Because the false statements communicated by a pornographic deepfake—that its subject posed for a nude photograph or participated in the production of pornography—arguably should not prejudice a victim in the eyes of her community, courts taking a normative approach may be tempted to dismiss defamation-via-deepfake claims for fear of validating irrational or regressive views. Nevertheless, pornographic deepfakes have the obvious capacity to cause profound reputational harm. As a result, pornographic deepfakes provide a valuable opportunity to consider the costs of a normative approach to defamation.

French tort law has been structured around the principle of full compensation, which aims to restore, as far as possible, the entirety of the harm caused by a wrongful act. This principle has been consistently applied to non-pecuniary damage, which French law does not confine to the compensation of transient moral suffering. Instead, non-pecuniary damage is conceived in a structural and multidimensional manner, encompassing impairments to the victim’s quality of life, restrictions on social participation, and the frustration of life plans and future prospects. This conceptual approach has been systematized through the Dintilhac nomenclature, which distinguishes between pecuniary and non-pecuniary losses and classifies the various heads of damage according to functional impairments and their impact on daily life and future autonomy. Although lacking formal binding force, the nomenclature has become a widely shared reference framework in judicial practice. In addition, indicative compensation guidelines developed by the courts of appeal, based on the Dintilhac framework, contribute to greater consistency and predictability in the assessment of damages. At the same time, French case law firmly rejects any mechanical application of such guidelines, repeatedly emphasizing that compensation must be assessed in concreto, with due regard to the individual circumstances of each victim. By contrast, Korean tort law and judicial practice have traditionally centered on the compensation of pecuniary loss, while the assessment of non-pecuniary damage has received comparatively limited doctrinal and practical development. The prevailing tendency to equate non-pecuniary damage primarily with moral suffering proves increasingly inadequate, as it fails to capture the enduring and structural effects of injury on the victim’s life as a whole. As a result, the quantification of non-pecuniary damage often relies heavily on judicial discretion grounded in equity, without sufficiently articulated criteria or transparent reasoning. Against this backdrop, this article analyzes the French approach to conceptualizing and assessing non-pecuniary damage in order to derive comparative insights for Korean law. The recognition of the plural dimensions of non-pecuniary harm, the structured differentiation of heads of loss, and the emphasis on the victim’s concrete and overall situation offer valuable guidance for enriching judicial reasoning and practice in Korea. Such a comparative perspective contributes to enhancing both the fairness and predictability of compensation, while strengthening the effective realization of the compensatory function of tort law.

Today a growing chorus of voices in the tort-law literature sings a siren song. AI harms must be redressed through across-the-board strict liability, they croon—the same standard we apply to dynamite users, lion tamers, and faulty-chainsaw makers. Their rationale is understandable: at first blush, many AI harms appear impervious to other traditional theories of tort. In what sense might a self-driving car be negligent? Or how might one prove that an AI’s neural network—a “black box” filled with billions or trillions of inscrutable numbers—is defective under a products-liability theory? But tempting though strict liability may be, categorically applying it to AI harms would be a mistake, for at least three reasons. First, just like human activities, AI activities are not monolithic. An AI-enabled treadmill does not pose the same risk as an AI demolitions robot. Second, our default tort rules will work far better than the chorus suggests. Negligence and products liability are high flexibility, high context doctrines that have a long history of redressing harms caused by novel activities and technologies. Plus, they aren’t our only tools. Where an AI activity presents the potential for catastrophic harm, tailored, domain-specific legislation will be the right tool for the job. And where AI activities cause non-tortious harms, data-driven insurance markets (old and new) will be well suited to fill most compensatory voids. Third, even if something like categorical strict liability just for AI harms were desirable, no current theory of tort law could justify the bifurcated tort system that kind of rule would create.

Haunted houses have existed in the United States for over a century, but despite their prominence, little legal precedent exists regarding their regulations. Given the growing commercialization of horror through movies and haunted houses, coupled with the increasing number of injuries linked to a controversial haunted house in Tennessee, the need for regulations has never been more urgent. Nevertheless, even outside of regulations, developments in tort and contract law show that contractual agreements to participate in a haunted house may not stand as enforceable contracts. Courts have consistently sided with haunted houses, claiming that patrons assume the risk when they consent to attend a haunted house, however, this does not acknowledge the lack of substantive precedent stemming from the prominence of binding, confidential arbitration clauses. This Note argues that the Consumer Product Safety Act should be expanded to include haunted houses, and unique regulations should be adopted to account for the typical contents of haunted houses. Additionally, this Note argues that courts should refrain from adhering to arbitration clauses in industries with high rates of injuries, such as amusement parks, and, in the absence of arbitration clauses, many haunted house contracts should be void. Under the traditional doctrine of assumption of risk, legally binding haunted house contracts should still be enforceable, preventing the flood of litigation that could arise without arbitration clauses.

This paper makes two points. First, García-Portela (2025) is an excellent proposal to address climate injustices and guide climate policy. García-Portela determines climate change related loss and damage by identifying the relevant injustices and linking them to climate change. Her version of the polluter pays principle overcomes relevant objections. She ensures that her proposal is feasible by engaging with attribution science and tort law practice. Secondly, one dimension of rectifying climate injus-tice is nonetheless underdeveloped. Many emissions happen(ed) with an attitude of disrespect for those likely to suffer from climate change. The relations between states responsible for the bulk of emissions and peo-ples likely to be worst affected are often already damaged through colo-nialism. The lack of climate action adds insult to injury. These relational climate injustices require rectification, too. García-Portela’s account is un-successful in grounding these but is well suited to be a part of a pluralist approach.

We summarize the 12th Competition on Legal Information Extraction and Entailment. In this edition, the competition included two tasks on case law, two tasks on statute law, plus a new pilot task on Tort law. The two case law components include an information retrieval task (Task 1), and the confirmation of an entailment relation between an existing case and an unseen case (Task 2). The statute law components include an information retrieval task (Task 3), and an entailment/question-answering task based on retrieved civil code statutes (Task 4). The new pilot task involves tort prediction and rationale extraction. Participation was open to any group using any approach. Eight teams submitted a total of 21 runs for Task 1, achieving a top F1 score of 0.3604, with dominant approaches featuring multi-stage retrieval pipelines combining traditional IR with neural re-ranking methods. We summarize the variety of approaches, provide our official evaluation, and give a summary analysis of our data and submission results. In Task 2, the NOWJ team, which used BM25 for retrieval and DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen/QwQ-32B for reranking, achieved the best score of 0.3195. Eight teams submitted a total of 22 runs for Task 3. The best-performing system employs a multi-stage retrieval approach: it first retrieves a limited number of candidate articles in the initial stage, then applies an LLM-based cross-encoder for re-ranking, and finally determines the relevant articles using multiple LLMs. This system achieves nearly perfect retrieval performance for questions with a single relevant article; however, it still faces challenges in retrieving all relevant articles for questions that have multiple relevant answers. 11 teams submitted a total of 29 runs for Task 4, achieving a top accuracy score of 0.9041, where the solution uses an LLM coupled with a prompt engineering approach. Most teams used LLMs but their approaches and the models used were quite different. The new pilot task received 10 runs from four teams. All the teams employed LLMs. The best performing runs are JAIST-LJPJT25 (acc.=0.765) by the CAPTAIN team for the tort prediction task and KIS5 (F1=0.712) by the KIS team for the rationale extraction task. Finally, based on the strong performance observed in Tasks 3 and 4 this year, we propose introducing a new task for the next COLIEE, focusing on statute retrieval.

The digital transformation of land administration through the issuance of Electronic Land Certificates is part of the modernization of public services aimed at increasing efficiency, transparency, and legal certainty. However, the implementation of electronic systems also raises various legal issues, particularly regarding state responsibility and accountability mechanisms in the event of administrative errors, system failures, or data leaks. This study aims to analyze the concept of state responsibility, forms of legal accountability, and the application of the principle of legality in the issuance of electronic land certificates. The research method used is normative juridical with a statutory, conceptual, and comparative approach. The research findings indicate that although electronic land certificates have a valid legal basis and the same evidentiary force as conventional certificates, weaknesses remain in the accountability mechanisms, division of responsibilities, and redress of rights for injured parties. Substantive legal certainty depends heavily on system reliability, data security, and the professionalism of administrators. This research concludes that technology integration in land administration must be accompanied by strengthened regulations, transparency, and clear accountability mechanisms to ensure legal protection and the principle of legality.

AJB is an authentic document whose validity is highly dependent on the manufacturing process that must meet legal provisions, one of which is the presence of the parties and PPAT when making and signing the Acte. The presence of PPAT is absolute because it acts as a state official who guarantees the formal and material truth of the contents of the Acte and explains the legal consequences of the transaction to the parties. This type of research is normative law research, with a study of legal materials containing normative legal rules. This research relates to legal norms that exist in society and in legislation and court decisions. In Indonesia Civil Code Clause 1338 Verse 3, good faith is only mentioned in relation to the making of treatys, but is not regulated further. Therefore, in SEMA Number 4 of 2016, buyers who have good faith are given a guarantee in the form of legal protection. Good faith itself consists of two types, namely subjective, which is interpreted as honesty, and objective, which is interpreted as a form of politeness and manners, whereby a person must also comply with social norms. A buyer acting in good faith is a buyer who carefully examines the physical condition and legal data of a transfer of land rights being purchased, both before and at the time of transfer. However, if the buyer is aware of a defect in the transfer of rights process, the buyer's good faith is considered lost. Legal protection for buyers is only for buyers acting in good faith. In the cancellation of an AJB, protection for buyers is in the form of a civil lawsuit against the deed and compensation. Under certain conditions, an agreement may be cancelled, either by the parties or by court order. As a form of binding agreement, a land sale and purchase agreement contains the rights and obligations of the parties who made it, so that if the terms agreed upon in the sale and purchase agreement are violated or not fulfilled by the parties who made it, then it can be said that there has been a breach of contract. Before a sale and purchase can be carried out before an authorised official, namely the Land Deed Official (PPAT), the parties who will sell and purchase land rights must meet all the requirements stipulated for the sale and purchase of land. Requirements regarding the object of sale and purchase, for example, the land rights to be sold and purchased are legally owned by the seller, as evidenced by a land certificate or other valid proof of such rights, and the land being sold and purchased is not in dispute with other parties, and so on

In the digital era, the infringement of personal information has become increasingly prominent, posing profound challenges to the principles of civil liability imputation. Traditional fault-based liability faces issues of ineffective relief and prevention due to the difficulties for information subjects in providing evidence and the challenges in assessing systemic risks. While no-fault liability can strengthen relief, it may lead to controversies such as the overgeneralization of liability and the stifling of innovation. A single imputation principle is insufficient to address the structural contradictions arising from the diversity of infringement forms, the complexity of causation, and the rigidity of exemptions from liability. This article posits that, based on reflecting on the limitations of existing principles, efforts should be directed toward constructing a layered, dynamic, and internally coordinated imputation system. This system allocates differentiated imputation principles based on the types of rights and the level of risks. By optimizing the core function of the presumption of fault principle and designing internal linkage mechanisms, such as dynamic conversion of imputation, coordinated burden of proof, and tiered exemptions, it aims to achieve the organic unification and systematic reconstruction of multiple values in tort law, including compensation, deterrence, and prevention.

This article examines Roman torts, as they were codified in modified forms in Byzantine legal texts that became part of the legal system of medieval Rus’, and also reflected in Russian legal acts of the era. During the imperial period, the legal positions of classical Roman tort law in the area of “compensation for damages” were enshrined in judicial practice, which relied on them for a long time, and in civil law doctrine. The latter, around the beginning of the 20th century, abandoned direct references to Roman law while retaining its approaches. The only concept that Russian law rejected for the vast majority of its history was no-fault liability.

Abstract This article integrates the concept of moral progress – here, moral improvement in the thinking and behavior of individuals over time – into the study of legal doctrine. The article first presents a naturalistic account of what moral progress is and describes three of its most historically and analytically important forms: (1) moral circle expansion , (2) moral domain expansion , and (3) increasing sensitivity to proportionality . The article then analyzes three historical developments in U.S. tort law that qualify as instances of moral progress: (1) the partial demise of the “suicide rule” beginning around the 1980s (according to the article, an episode of moral circle expansion), (2) the liberalization of recovery for emotional harm in the negligent infliction tort beginning around the 1970s (moral domain expansion), and (3) the near-total replacement of contributory negligence by comparative negligence throughout the twentieth century (increasing sensitivity to proportionality). The article ends by outlining three legal scholarly implications of the analysis. (1) Legal scholars may be able to use the concept of moral progress as a criterion for making internal as opposed to external criticisms of tort law. (2) Attending to historical moral progress in an area of law facilitates sounder assessment of the area’s present-day moral value. (3) Studying moral progress in legal doctrine can identify open legal historical questions about historical legal actors’ motives. More generally, this article can inform legal scholars who seek to analyze morally progressive or regressive change in any area of law.

Abstract The evaluation of bodily injury is one of the most complicated areas of tort law. How should the value of a human limb be determined, and what are the relevant parameters for doing so? Rules for appraising personal injury invite a review of fundamental value-based questions about human nature and social structure. For example, one must contemplate whether the body’s organs have an intrinsic value embedded in them, or whether an instrumental value to achieve benefits; is it appropriate to estimate the value of human body organs through the lens of the earning capacity latent in them, or perhaps as part of one’s dignity and social status; is the rich person’s hand equal in the eyes of tort law to poor person’s hand, a man’s hand to a woman’s hand or there is a distinct value for the limbs of each individual. This article compares the approaches of three legal systems: Roman law, Jewish law and modern (American) law. I argue that each of these three legal traditions developed distinct methods for evaluating bodily injury, which reflect unique conceptions of human nature and social structure. For that purpose, a careful analysis of both monetary damages and non-pecuniary damages according to these legal systems is needed, with emphasis on their socio-economic ramifications. An in-depth examination of the arrangements offered by these legal traditions enable us to station a critical mirror to modern society.

This paper deals with the compensation for damages caused by injuring or killing of a companion animal in Serbian tort law, where the main focus is on explaining the influence which ‘animal welfare’, as a legally protected non-patrimonial interest violated due to injury or killing of a companion animal, and ‘emotional relationship between the owner and his/her injured or killed animal companion’ may have on the application of tort law rules on recovery of damages. Firstly, the author tries to clarify the general influence of ‘animal welfare’ on the legal treatment of animals in Serbian civil law, since it seems that such clarification is necessary for the interpretation of the rules of civil law (particularly those of tort law). Thereafter, the author discusses the tort law rules for determining the amount of compensable pecuniary damages for an injured or killed companion animal, with special attention given to the problem of recovering costs for the veterinary treatment of the injured companion animal, which may be significantly higher than the animal’s market value. To solve this problem, the author examines whether the fact that the owner is, pursuant to Serbian animal welfare legislation, obliged to take care of ‘welfare’ of his/her companion animal and to provide the veterinary treatment in case of its injury (i.e. in case of violation of ‘animal welfare’) can be relevant enough for awarding the compensation of costs necessary for such treatment in accordance with the existing rules of Serbian tort law, irrespective of the companion animal’s market value and effectiveness of veterinary treatment. Finally, the author discusses the relevance of the emotional relationship between the owner and his/her injured or killed animal companion in Serbian tort law, focusing on the analysis of tort law provisions that may exceptionally enable the owner of an injured or killed companion animal to claim monetary compensation for the emotional/sentimental value that the animal had for him/her.

This article argues that expedited regulatory review programs for innovative products, like the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Breakthrough Devices Program (BDP), should not be paired with immunity from tort liability for those products and their developers. Doing so both limits the ability of regulators to manage the risks of new products while simultaneously undermining incentives for their developers to adopt internal systems that address those risks. In non-emergency contexts, expedited review and liability immunity together could elevate innovation as a policy goal in the short-term above the more fundamental principles of safety and effectiveness for those new products over time and across populations. At minimum, if these two policies are deployed at once, they should only occur in the context of heightened regulatory supervision over those products both during and after review, backed up by a strong legal mandate for the regulator and adequate resources to conduct supervision. To make this argument, the article provides an in-depth analysis of the FDA’s Breakthrough Devices Program, an initiative from the 21st Century Cures Act for promoting innovation in medical devices by reducing scrutiny of their safety and effectiveness. The analysis applies doctrinal and empirical approaches to explore the Program’s legal foundations, current operations, and implications of liability preemption for patients and device manufacturers. Some patients have already been harmed by breakthrough devices and, while the Cures Act leaves some legal uncertainty, doctrinal analysis shows those patients appear likely to have limited remedies in tort law against some of these devices due to federal liability preemption. The article argues for loosening the current federal preemption of state-level tort liability for medical devices that were approved through the BDP, paired with greater regulatory supervision by the FDA both during and after the Program. While innovation remains an important policy goal, it should never surpass safety as a core regulatory imperative for novel products.

The article discusses the institution of the beneficiary of another person's remedy in a criminal trial. It was noted that it introduces a clear privilege for the accused, and since it refers to the principle of law, it requires respect not only for the passive side of the process, but also for the active side. There is no axiological justification why this beneficiary should apply only to the accused and not to the injured party. Such differentiation of entities characterized by the same main feature violates the constitutional values referred to in Art. 32 of the Constitution, introducing the principle of equality.

Abstract This article explores the enactment of the Civil Wrongs Ordinance in Mandate Palestine in order to question the utility of “Anglicization” as a historical lens, and to suggest that it tends to crowd out more helpful framings, in particular those involving distributive or class motivations and effects. The Ordinance has been portrayed primarily as an instance of the codification of the common law of torts and its import to Palestine. Without denying the Englishness of the Ordinance, this article demonstrates that it did not codify the common law of tort but went considerably beyond it in reforming Palestine’s liability regime. It further argues that the “Anglicization” framing obscures more than it illuminates, missing the massive redistribution of risk, costs, liability, and welfare that resulted from the change in Palestine’s tort law. The study also complicates the commonly accepted chronology of the development of compensation for injuries in the common law world. In Palestine, English-style tort law was the product of progressive reform, designed to overcome the shortcomings of the preceding regime of workers’ compensation schemes. The significance of Anglicized tort law in this jurisdiction was thus very different, in some ways the polar opposite, of that in other, better-known contexts.