Old Liability Rules Under New Scrutiny – 2026.05.07
The Rui Cunha Foundation presents today, Thursday, May 7th at 6:30pm, a conference titled “Old Liability Rules Under New Scrutiny”, inserted in the Reflections at Sunset series, with guest speaker Isabel Mousinho de Figueiredo, Assistant Professor at the Macau Legal Studies Department of the Faculty of Lawof University of Macau. The moderator will be Ricardo Vera-Cruz, Associate Lawyer at Leonel Alberto Alves Law Firm.
The theme focuses on the discrepancy between the liability rules in 19th-century Germany and England, to the modern era and the digital economy. The analysis on concepts such as «unlawfulness and liability» have justified «drawing from comparative law to clarify future court decisions», according to the academic.
Isabel Mousinho de Figueiredo acknowledges that «the recent jury decisions in the US convicting Meta and Google are a welcome progress, long overdue. This raises a deeper question: What damage should be recoverable? The German legislator from 1896 bound the judiciary by requiring a voluntary act, unlawfulness, fault, causation and harm for tort. Only physical damage should be recoverable unless clearly stated otherwise. But this formula does not help solving difficult cases».
The concepts of ‘act’, ‘unlawfulness’, ‘fault’, ‘causation’ and ‘harm’ «only assist decisionmakers with the classic examples from which they were originally developed», she argues. «This exposes that the German methodology ends up being judge made law. The difference between common law is, then, that the German rule covers fewer cases. We can improve both approaches by mergingthem and futureproofing them beyond the digital present», is her proposal for discussion.
Isabel Mousinho de Figueiredo is an Assistant Professor at University of Macau, where she teaches Civil and Comparative Law. She earned her Bachelor, Master and PhD from University of Lisbon, Portugal, and is specialized in Private Law. She taught Contract Law, Procedural Law, Jurisprudence and Property Law at University of Lisbon. She was a Legal Linguist at the European Court of Justice.
She is a member of the Portuguese Bar Association for over 20 years and has authored a book on Tort Law and other legal publications in English, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
The session will be held in English.
Admission is free.
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