A liberal approach to the recovery of net economic losses in the national legal systems of France, Italy and Spain

Frameworks of recovery of pure economic losses remain to a certain extent little studied in the domestic doctrine. Meanwhile, in practice, problems related to the establishment of appropriate conditions for the recovery of such losses increasingly arise. It is known that the Russian tort law is based on the principle of general tort, according to which any culpably caused harm is subject to compensation. This determines the need to investigate the legal systems that also share this principle (France, Italy, Spain). Law and order with such wide limits of tort liability is commonly called liberal. As a result, the author comes to the following conclusions: 1) in France the key element of tort liability is harm, regardless of which rights of the victim are violated. Therefore, the problem of pure economic losses does not arise at all; 2) unlike in France, the Italian legal system is more restrained, since one of the main conditions of tort liability is wrongfulness. A tort obligation arises here, as a rule, only when the absolute rights of the victim are infringed. The article reflects on the well-known “Meroni doctrine” in Italy, which is often used by Italian courts when justifying the possibility of collecting pure economic losses; 3) in Spain, it is customary to use illegality and causality as the main methods of establishing the framework of tort liability when recovering pure economic losses. Thus, liberal legal systems have developed various criteria that allow limiting, in some cases, the possibility of recovering pure economic losses.