Welcome to Finding Fault

Welcome! This website contains information from a research study on European legal development. The purpose of the site is to make our findings widely available, and perhaps even interest you in the implications of the development of the law on your lives.

The aim of the study is to better understand the reasons for legal development. In other words, the researchers wanted to know why the law changes over time, and what forces drive change in which directions. This helps us understand what has happened in the past, why the law is the way it is now, and perhaps, what it might become in the future. To do this, you first have to chart what the law has been over a period of time: in our case roughly 1850-2000. These dates were picked for a number of reasons, but especially to help make the project doable. In addition, to understand the forces behind legal change, you have to look beyond the experience of one country and investigate many. The study has looked at Western European states, i.e. England, Scotland, The Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavian Countries, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. These two approaches, of looking back in time and out to other countries, are known as legal history and comparative law.

The idea of “Fault” was chosen as the example of a legal concept to be traced. Put very simply, fault is the idea that you have done something wrong. For a long time, the existence of fault has been a key question before making someone pay compensation, or, depending on the context, suffer punishment. In order to research the development of fault, six contexts of fault in the law were chosen. These are the “legal case studies” you see in the navigation bar: Medical, Disputes between Neighbours, Defective Products, Vehicle Accidents, Technological Change (charting some period specific technological risks: sparks from railways, exploding boilers and asbestos) and the Theory of Fault. During this stage of the research, some particular factors driving legal change became more obvious.

The next step has been to focus on the factors promoting the evolution of the law. This allows us to look, from the viewpoint of one of these factors, and see how the law relating to fault has been affected. These are also on the navigation bar under “forces for development”. They are grouped into three headings: Institutions and Professions of the Law (looking at reasons within legal world as to why the law might change), Social and Philosophical Ideas (the connection between the law and other intellectual movements) and the Economy (insurance, the movement of capital, the growth of large companies etc.).

Finally, there is an overview of some of the more detailed conclusions to come from this study. This is the section which draws out unified themes from the first two parts of the study.

The project will ultimately be published as a series of books, but this site contains a simplified outline of the project. The research has involved nearly 100 researchers from all over Europe, although it is based at the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. It is coming to the end of a three year research period. The project has been possible thanks to funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. This is the primary government vehicle to support research into the Arts and Humanities in the United Kingdom.

We hope you find the website useful and interesting. We welcome feedback.