Civil Law Responses to Criminal Judgments in England and Spain
(2012) 3 Journal of European Tort Law 308
University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 47/2013
39 Pages Posted: 18 Oct 2013 Last revised: 25 Oct 2013
Date Written: October 1, 2013
Abstract
The interfaces between tort and crime can have a profound impact on legal reasoning and outcomes. Even though these interfaces have not received much academic attention, courts and legislators have been forced to deal with the boundary issues litigants raise. A particularly fruitful starting point for academic work is to consider how the two areas of law have developed procedural rules to coordinate their responses to a single set of events. This article examines one such example: the extent to which the civil law uses prior criminal law determinations in two European systems, namely England and Spain. England’s scarcity of theoretical approaches has underpinned a steady development of case jurisprudence; Spanish law complements this story by showing how an academically inspired legislative regime can still evolve as a result of its own internal pressures. Understanding how the civil law has developed methods to tap into the work of the criminal courts is a useful step in building a fuller picture of how tort and crime interact and what effect those interactions have in the wider world.
Keywords: tort, crime, spain, england, conviction, legal reasoning, evidence
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