Volume 16, Issue 3

205Abstract Keeping pace with the advances in bioinformatics and digitalisation has become one of the central tasks of today’s legal system and its respective sub-areas. However, this will no longer be possible in the future without moving away from the ideal of a technology-free human individual as the only possible legal subject. Supreme Court case law recognises this necessity when it extends the boundaries of the human body beyond its ‘skin and skullcap’ and searches for ‘functional units’ of people and things in the world. Within the law, this can lead to legal subjectivity no longer being attributed exclusively to flesh-and-blood humans, but possibly also to non-human beings that have combined with them to form a single entity. Since the European Virtual Human Twins Initiative was launched by the European Commission in December 2023 to support the development and implementation of solutions for virtual human twins in the health and care sector, the protection of the human body has also shifted beyond the analogue world into a digital world. Legal protection concepts for digital body data that are analogous to ownership will no longer help people in the foreseeable future. Effective protection of the legal subject ‘human being’ in its entirety, ie including its technical self-extensions and images, is only possible by turning away from the traditional subject-object dualism and can only be found in a ‘deanthropocentric legal subjectivity’. This involves renegotiating who or what can, and should, have the status of a legal subject under changed social conditions. The task of a technologically-enlightened law is to identify the new ‘legal subject candidates’ and examine their personification potential. Although the present treatise examines the phenomenon of bodily externalisations based on German tort law, the developed theses are universally applicable to other legal systems. 206In the words of Rudolf Wiethölter, ‘work on the paradigm, not in the paradigm’. 1

226Abstract Tort law and human rights law represent two distinct legal frameworks that have been deployed in climate change litigation. Historically, early climate cases were predominantly grounded in tort law; however, a more recent and significant trend, referred to by some scholars as the ‘rights turn’, has seen a surge in rights-based claims. Despite the fundamental differences in their origins, objectives, policy considerations, scope, and available remedies, these two areas of law also operate within a comparable liability framework. The present study analyses the key challenges that have traditionally hindered tort-based climate litigation, including issues of justiciability, standing, defining compensable harm, establishing unlawful behaviour, and proving causation. By examining landmark cases from different parts of the world, the paper questions how the shift toward rights-based litigation may introduce novel legal strategies and frameworks to address these very challenges in tort-based litigation, ultimately reshaping the landscape of climate litigation.

265Abstract Around the world, plaintiffs exposed to climate-related harms or hazards are increasingly bringing tort claims against private corporations. Many argue that these lawsuits are dead on arrival because tort law is ill-equipped to address the complexities posed by climate change. In this article, I aim to demonstrate the opposite. I will show that causation is no longer an insurmountable hurdle and that plaintiffs stand a realistic chance of succeeding in court. Moreover, imposing a duty of care on major greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters is neither arbitrary nor unfair, but fully consistent with well-established tort doctrine and case law. Applying the principle of several liability, major GHG emitters should be held liable in proportion to their contribution to the climate-related harm or hazard suffered by the plaintiff. To build my argument, I draw on a prominent climate liability case from Germany that was recently decided: Lliuya v RWE – in which the court endorsed many of the arguments presented here and confirmed that major GHG emitters can, in principle, be held liable for climate-related harms and hazards. Since the concepts of causation and duty of care share a common core across jurisdictions, my analysis of German doctrine and case law will offer valuable insights for climate liability litigation around the world.

296Abstract In this paper, we compare the legislation and the case law in France and Mauritius on the delictual liability of parents for the harm caused by their minor child(ren). Such a comparison is justified from a historical point of view, as in Mauritius, even today, French civil law plays the role of a persuasive authority. However, important differences can be discerned between the French and Mauritian tort law regimes as regards the delictual liability of parents for the actions of their minor children. These differences concern the nature of the liability of parents, the place of the fault of a child in the structure of the delictual liability of their parents, the possibility/impossibility of emancipating a minor by marriage or a court decision, and the definition of cohabitation. This paper contains a critical analysis of these differences.