Volume 8, Issue 3

On 29 August 2016, in a claim by Pakistani survivors and legal heirs against German retailer KiK for injuries and deaths during a fire at a factory supplying jeans in Karachi, German judges accepted jurisdiction and granted legal aid to the Pakistani claimants to cover the legal fees. The case pending before the German court thus poses the question of supply chain liability. Taking the lawsuit by the Pakistani plaintiffs against KiK in Germany as a case study, this article provides an analysis of the available legal grounds for such liability. Economic changes have ushered in linkages between purchasers and suppliers that call for strong principles of liability – principles that are already embedded in the law but which need fresh articulation and application. English courts have only recently recognised that under certain circumstances, liability might attach to a parent company under the tort of negligence for damage to third parties ostensibly caused by its subsidiary. The KiK case is testing the extension of such liability to certain supply chain relationships. Beyond that, the case is also testing the application of the rules on non-delegable duties and vicarious liability in the supply chain context. Even if the court disagrees with the claimants’ position, the novel arguments advanced in this case are likely to be the starting point for an important debate about the proper fit between traditional tort law and the fast changing commercial and employment relationships of the 21st century.

The article analyses legal theory on compensation for acts of necessity. It set out to answer why a legally sanctioned act should be subject to compensation as a tort. The article accounts for present doctrines and theories. Based on this overview, the article suggest that the field presently operates from a shared set of idealised facts and that this limits the application of the prevalent theories. In order to devise a more flexible model, the article approaches the issue of compensation as inherent in the necessity decision itself. This sets out to solve the issue of compensation on a case-to-case basis under consideration of what causes the least possible interference. Accordingly, the issue of compensation must include a wide range of arguments and interests, rather than one structuring rule.

Autonomous vehicles are no longer a mere futuristic fantasy. They will be commercialised one day. According to recent predictions, fully autonomous or ‘driverless’ vehicles could already be available within five to twenty years. Although traffic will become much safer with autonomous vehicles, accidents will not suddenly disappear. Autonomous vehicles will probably share the road with ‘regular’ non-autonomous cars during a considerably long transition period. This interaction between humans and software will inevitably lead to accidents. Recent accidents show that the technology used in autonomous vehicles is not entirely flawless either. Against this background, this article examines the potential liability of users and producers under Belgian tort law for damage caused by autonomous vehicles. The article proposes a number of solutions to overcome some of the detected hurdles. Although we take a Belgian perspective, most of the article’s findings also apply to other legal systems as they face similar challenges.