It is characteristic of the author of this book, Gert Brüggemeier, to design and present comprehensive reviews of legal subjects, mainly in the law of liability, and this has been at the centre of his academic work. In his research, he combines the past with the present and the future, and discusses national, European and global law in conjunction with each other. He had an early interest in the Europeanisation and transnationalisation of laws, exploring the divergences and convergences of legal cultures and mentalities, linking liability, insurance and social security and, beyond that, law and economics.

For a description of the author's research activities, see the preface to the Liber Amicorum Gert Brüggemeier (A. Colombi-Ciacchi, C. Godt, P. Rott and L. J. Smith, eds. (Berlin: Nomos, 2009), 7–8).

The present work displays the same comprehensive approach. After presenting a Draft Bill of his own on civil liability laws, the author combines this with two European reform proposals and links them to three recent legislative codes from outside the EU (China, Brazil, and Russia). In the Draft Bill, he combines basic assumptions of the past (fault liability for wrongful conduct) with basic developments in the present (enterprise, professional and States, stricter and strict liability) and develops a middle ground between the (French) general clause approach and the (German) enumerated-interest approach. He stresses the importance of the method of judicial application and development, supplementing the instrument of legislative norm making.