Network Responsibility: European Tort Law and the Society of Networks

The contemporary landscape of transnational political economy is dominated by networks. Public and private networks, and networks that combine public and private actors, cross borders, exert regulatory power and their activities often harm third parties. However, tort law as a traditional source of remediation for third party harms appears impotent when faced with the problem of regulating the ‘society of networks’. This book, using a systems theory framework, retraces the emergence of tort law in modernity and highlights how two models of normative ascription - personal responsibility and organizational liability - have come to shape existing tort law’s ambivalence towards network phenomena. This book breaks new ground by leaving behind the national law ‘frame of reference’, drawing on the conceptual promise of EU law to develop a concept of ‘network responsibility’ for a network society and lays the foundations of a tort law for the 21st century.