Injury to Persons, Property, and Relations, Doctrinal Issues in

Legal systems provide various answers when there are injuries to persons, property, and relations. The term injury is understood in the sense that a person other than the injured has caused the injury or, by her activities, has otherwise contributed to it. This entry therefore does not deal with injuries caused solely by natural disasters or like catastrophes for which no other person is responsible.

Injuries to persons, property, and relations are the unavoidable corollary wherever human beings live together and form a social community. In modern societies, the risk of being injured by the activities of others has increased compared with former times. This is due to many factors: an increase in population and social contacts; closer proximity to a greater number of neighbors; technical developments such as faster and stronger means of transportation, which pose greater risks; bigger and more dangerous industrial plants; and so on. How to react if injuries occur is and always has been one of the central challenges of society, and a main field of societal reaction is the legal system. Whenever a person suffers such loss, the law may be called on to react. The law can try, and certainly does much, to prevent the occurrence of injuries by precautionary measures such as safety standards, quality supervision, and the like. This precaution principle has recently gained increased importance.

Nevertheless, the law also has to take a stance if an injury has happened and ascertain how the loss can be allocated. Three principle reactions are possible: (1) let the victim bear the loss, (2) shift the loss to somebody else, or (3) share the loss between the victim and the other(s). All three solutions have been favored at different times and by various countries and can still be found in probably every current system of law. The task of the law is to find a reasonable and just mixture of these positions. The common starting point, however, is generally to let losses lie where they fall unless there is good reason to place the loss on someone else's shoulders.