The next presentaion in the Kirby Seminar Series for 2017 will be by Professor Emeritus Helmut Koziol on Monday, 25 September at 12pm held in the Lewis Seminar Room, W38 EBL Building.

Helmut Koziol, born 1940 in Vienna, studied law in Graz (Austria) and received his degree (Dr. iur.) in 1963. He worked as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Bonn (Germany) from 1963 to 1967, afterwards in Vienna (Austria) and qualified 1967 as a Universitätsdozent (non-tenured associate professor) of private law. In 1967 he was awarded a tenured professorship in private law in Linz (Austria) and he held a full professorship post at the University of Vienna from 1969 to 2000. Koziol has presided over the European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law (ECTIL) as Managing Director since its establishment in 1999 and he acted as Managing Director of the Institute for European Tort Law (ETL) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

presents
Common Law – Civil Law; Tort Law – “Schadenersatzrecht”

Between the common law systems, in Europe of England and Ireland, on the one side, and civil law systems, i.e. all Continental European legal systems, on the other hand, there are fundamental differences.  It seems worth the effort to investigate whether these differences have decisive effects on the ways of thinking and thus on discussions and solutions of many problems.  The lecture further intends to show that the common equating of Continental European “Schadenersatzrecht” (law of compensation of damage) with the term “tort law” is highly dubious. The civil law term and the common law term are based on different concepts and different ways of thinking. If this is not adequately taken into account, the risk that wrong conclusions will be drawn is very real.