Viktor Mataja · 1888
Viktor Mataja’s review of Alb. Zeerleder’s Die Schweizerische Haftpflichtgesetzgebung assesses a systematic legal exposition whose value extends into social policy. Zeerleder treats liability under Swiss obligations law, concentrating on special legislation for railways, steam navigation, and factory and industrial employers. Mataja identifies the perspective governing both the exposition and its opening historical chapter:
Die Arbeit ist demnach zunächst juristischen und nicht sozialpolitischen Inhalts; demgemäss ist auch das zu Beginn gestellte Kapitel über die Geschichte der Haftpflichtgesetzgebung in der Schweiz abgefasst.
English translation: The work is accordingly in the first instance of juristic and not of social-political content; and the chapter placed at the beginning, on the history of liability legislation in Switzerland, is composed accordingly.
The review’s central move is to show how this private-law approach nevertheless serves economic and social-policy inquiry. Systematic analysis clarifies provisions made harder to survey by the extension and reform law of 26 April 1887. Judicial decisions and occasional criticisms also reveal the practical difficulties of administering liability. Mataja thus reads legal exposition as evidence of the limitations of the legislation itself.
His strongest concern is the conflict generated when parties with opposed interests must apply uncertain legal categories to particular accidents:
Bedenklich wird es diesen freilich stimmen, wenn er sieht, welche Fülle von Zweifeln und Kontroversen bereits in dem engen Rahmen der einschlägigen Gesetze entstanden sind und welche fruchtbare Qelle von Streitigkeiten und Verbitterung damit geschaffen ist, wenn die doch verschiedene, ja entgegengesetzte Interessen vertretenden Parteien daran gehen, so schwer präzis fassbare Begriffe wie Verschulden, höhere Gewalt etc. auf konkrete Vorfälle anzuwenden.
English translation: It will, to be sure, give him pause when he sees what a wealth of doubts and controversies has already arisen within the narrow compass of the relevant statutes, and what a fruitful source of disputes and bitterness has thereby been created, when parties representing after all different, indeed opposed, interests set about applying to concrete occurrences concepts so hard to grasp with precision, such as fault, force majeure, and the like.
The difficulty is not merely technical ambiguity: adjudication becomes a source of disputes and bitterness. Mataja also finds partial measures and inconsistencies in the classification of factories subject to liability and in the recognition of compensation rights constrained by an evidently inadequate maximum. He carefully distinguishes these objections from his assessment of Zeerleder:
Selbstverständlich jedoch richten sich derartige Erwägungen nicht gegen das Werk; sie gewinnen nur an Klarheit durch die juristisch-systematische Behandlung des Stoffes in demselben.
English translation: It goes without saying, however, that considerations of this sort are not directed against the work; they only gain in clarity through the juristic-systematic treatment of the material within it.
The review closes by praising the book’s accessible writing and its appendix of relevant laws and regulations. Its significance lies in this double judgment: Zeerleder’s legal systematization is useful precisely because it makes both the operation and the shortcomings of Swiss liability legislation more visible.
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