Civil liability
Making good a harm: contractual and tort liability, the three conditions, the types of damage, full compensation and the grounds for exoneration.
- 25 cards
- 4 topics
- Free
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A few cards from the deck
Civil liability: what is it?
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The obligation to make good the harm done to another person, through compensation that puts the victim back where they would be without that harm.
Its aim is to repair, not to punish: the compensation goes to the victim, and its amount follows the harm suffered, not the seriousness of the fault.
A technician unplugs a shop's server by mistake, but the site had already gone down two hours earlier because of a host outage. For the sales lost during those two hours, which condition is missing against the technician?
- The causal link
- The event giving rise to liability
- The harm
- The technician's capacity
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The causal link
The technician's mistake exists and so do the lost sales, but the host's outage would have caused them anyway: his fault is not the cause of that harm.
The three conditions of civil liability are the …, the … and the ….
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The three conditions of civil liability are the event giving rise to liability, the harm and the causal link.
All three are needed: a fault without harm leaves nothing to repair, and a harm with no link to the fault cannot be blamed on it.
Contractual liability: what is it?
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The obligation to make good the harm that failing to perform a contract causes to the other party to it (article 1231-1 of the Civil Code).
Between two contracting parties it applies alone: you cannot prefer article 1240 to get a better result. Article 1240 covers people with no contract between them.
A host relies on force majeure after a power cut that the distributor had announced ten days earlier. What does the judge decide?
- Force majeure: a power cut always lies beyond his control
- No force majeure: the event was foreseeable, the host pays compensation
- Force majeure, since the electricity distributor is a third party foreign to the host
- No force majeure, but the host pays only half
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No force majeure: the event was foreseeable, the host pays compensation
Force majeure needs an unforeseeable and irresistible event. An announced cut can be prepared for (generator, failover): the host is not exonerated.