Category Archives: Products liability
Miriam Buiten, ‘Product liability for defective AI’
ABSTRACT This paper studies the efficient definition of product defects for AI systems with autonomous capabilities. It argues that defining defects in product liability law is central to distributing responsibility between producers and users. The paper proposes aligning the standard for defect with the relative control over and awareness of product risk possessed by the […]
Elias Van Gool, ‘Overview of German Product Liability Law’
ABSTRACT This is an unpublished excerpt from my doctoral dissertation, which has been entirely omitted in the final, published version due to reasons of scope. It might be of interest to comparative legal researchers and non-German-speaking lawyers, since it is more comprehensive and recent than other English texts on German product liability law sensu lato. […]
Beatriz Botero Arcila, ‘AI Liability in Europe: The Problem of the Human in the Loop’
ABSTRACT Who should compensate you if you get hit by a Tesla in ‘autopilot’ mode: the safety driver or the car manufacturer? What about if you find out you were unfairly discriminated against by an AI decision-making tool that was being supervised by an HR professional? Should the developer compensate you, the company that procured […]
Jan van Staalduinen, ‘The Doctor and the Missing Link – EU Product Liability for Clinical (AI) Decision Support Systems’
ABSTRACT Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are computer systems that are designed to support clinical decision making, usually about individual patients. An example of a CDSS is the AI system that is central to the DECIDE-VerA project, which assists GPs by analysing a patient’s risk of developing cardiovascular diseases. If a decision which involved the […]
Li and Schütte, ‘The proposal for a revised Product Liability Directive: The emperor’s new clothes?’
ABSTRACT On September 28, 2022, the European Commission presented the long-awaited proposal for a revised Product Liability Directive (PLD). By adapting rules and concepts to digitalization and circular economy, the revised PLD aims to ensure that the damage that defective products caused can be remedied adequately. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the substantive […]
Duffourc and Gerke, ‘Decoding US Tort Liability in Healthcare’s Black-Box Era: Lessons From the EU’
ABSTRACT The rapid development of sophisticated artificial intelligence (‘AI’) tools in healthcare presents new possibilities for improving medical treatment and general health. Currently, such AI tools can perform a wide range of health-related tasks, from specialized autonomous systems that diagnose diabetic retinopathy to general-use generative models like ChatGPT that answer users’ health-related questions. On the […]
Koch and others, ‘European Commission’s Public Consultation on Civil Liability – Adapting Liability Rules to the Digital Age and Artificial Intelligence’
ABSTRACT The authors welcome the opportunity to respond to the public consultation of the European Commission on ‘Civil Liability – Adapting Liability Rules to the Digital Age and Artificial Intelligence’. In this survey, the Commission first asks for feedback on whether and how to improve the Product Liability Directive (PLD), and in a second part […]
‘The Citadel As Sandcastle’
Alexandra D Lahav, ‘A Revisionist History of Products Liability’ (9 January 2023), available at SSRN. The story of the rise and fall of privity of contract in products liability is familiar to all torts scholars. William Prosser even labeled privity a ‘citadel’ and wrote two significant law review articles discussing in martial terms the assault […]
Saloni Khanderia, ‘Self-Driving Cars and Some (Unintended) Regulatory Barriers in India: A Road Less Travelled?’
ABSTRACT The deployment of self-driving cars seems to be the recent focus in several parts of the world. The operation of Robotaxis, shuttles and other forms of public transport in the United States [the US], China and France are illustrative of these trends. Some other parts of the world, such as Germany and Japan, have […]
Fairgrieve and others, ‘Product Liability and Online Marketplaces: Comparison and Reform’
ABSTRACT This article analyses the challenges that online marketplaces and e-commerce pose to traditional product liability doctrines. It uses a comparative perspective to examine whether an online platform can be liable to a consumer for a defective product purchased on its platform, and the adaption of product liability law to this challenge in a series […]