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In The Pilot-Judgment Procedure of the European Court of Human Rights Dominik Haider examines if this recent approach to tackle structural human rights deficiencies in member states is reconcilable with the European Convention on Human Rights.

Liability law is rapidly changing in quite a number of countries. This is due to various factors, which are interrelated to a large extent: changing case law and legislation as well as increased and still increasing technical and medical knowledge. As a result, various occupational diseases can, for example, be attributed to working conditions or personal injury to specific products. From the very moment that causation can be proven, the question arises of whether or not liability can be established‑ with far-reaching economic consequences for all parties involved. The rise of phenomena such as mass torts, multiple causation, joint and several liability or various heads of damages (like ecological damage and several diseases and affections) rapidly increases the interest in tort law. In the context of the interrelation between liability and insurance, attention must be paid to the question of whether certain liabilities are still coverable or not, and, if they are, to what amounts. (The question of jurisdictions is of growing importance as is the question of whether a specific liability can be covered by insurance. In this context, one should bear in mind that the affordability of tort law also requires safe and sound insurers. The recent past has shown that there is a limit to their financial stability.).

Le present ouvrage decrit l'architecture juridictionnelle de l'Union europeenne et analyse en profondeur tous les types de recours qui peuvent etre introduits devant les trois juridictions qui composent la Cour de justice de l'Union europeenne (la Cour de justice, le Tribunal et le Tribunal de la fonction publique), sans oublier le role important du juge national dans l'application quotidienne du droit de l'Union europeenne.Si la premiere edition integrait deja les modifications apportees par le Traite de Lisbonne, sa recente entree en vigueur laissait un nombre important de questions en suspens. Cette nouvelle edition permet de repondre a plusieurs d'entre elles (comme l'etendue de la nouvelle possibilite d'agir en annulation pour le particulier sur la base de l'article 263 du traite sur le fonctionnement de l'Union europeenne par exemple). Elle integre egalement les modifications apportees au statut de la Cour de justice et le nouveau reglement de procedure de la Cour entierement refondu en octobre 2012.Comme pour la premiere edition, les auteurs ont par ailleurs adopte une methodologie originale en fondant leur propos et leur analyse sur la jurisprudence produite par les juridictions de la Cour de justice de l'Union europeenne jusqu'au 31 janvier 2014. Ce sont ainsi pres de 1900 decisions de jurisprudence qui sont commentees dans l'ouvrage (soit pres de 600 supplementaires par rapport a la premiere edition). Elles sont inventoriees minutieusement dans un index mis a disposition des praticiens.Les principaux textes de procedure propres aux juridictions europeennes sont quant a eux desormais compiles dans un second volume, permettant ainsi leur utilisation plus aisee par les praticiens.

Whether with regard to mass torts, civil-rights claims or as a means of private enforcement of antitrust and other regulatory policies: Collective redress of civil claims has been gaining in importance in Europe and worldwide.

In the aftermath of sixth-century barbarian invasions, the legal profession that had grown and flourished during the Roman Empire vanished. Nonetheless, professional lawyers suddenly reappeared in Western Europe seven hundred years later during the 1230s when church councils and public authorities began to impose a body of ethical obligations on those who practiced law. James Brundage’s The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession traces the history of legal practice from its genesis in ancient Rome to its rebirth in the early Middle Ages and eventual resurgence in the courts of the medieval church. By the end of the eleventh century, Brundage argues, renewed interest in Roman law combined with the rise of canon law of the Western church to trigger a series of consolidations in the profession. New legal procedures emerged, and formal training for proctors and advocates became necessary in order to practice law in the reorganized church courts. Brundage demonstrates that many features that characterize legal advocacy today were already in place by 1250, as lawyers trained in Roman and canon law became professionals in every sense of the term. A sweeping examination of the centuries-long power struggle between local courts and the Christian church, secular rule and religious edict, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession will be a resource for the professional and the student alike.

The parametric catalogue of Italian earthquakes CPTI15 (Catalogo Parametrico dei Terremoti Italiani) represents the latest of a 45-years-long tradition of earthquake catalogues for Italy, and a significant innovation with respect to its predecessors. CPTI15 combines all known information on significant Italian earthquakes of the period 1000–2017, balancing instrumental and macroseismic data. Although the compilation criteria are the same as in the previous CPTI11 version, released in 2012, the catalogue has been revised as concerns: the time coverage, extended to 2017; the associated macroseismic data, improved in quantity and quality; the considered instrumental data, new and/or updated; the energy thresholds, lowered to maximum or epicentral intensity 5 or magnitude 4.0 (instead of 5–6 and 4.5, respectively); the determination of parameters from macroseismic data, based on a new calibration; the instrumental magnitudes, resulting from new sets of data and new conversion relationships to Mw. The catalogue considers and harmonizes data of different types and origins, both macroseismic and instrumental. For all earthquakes, the magnitude is given in terms of true or proxy moment magnitude (Mw), with the related uncertainty. The compilation procedure rigorously implements data and methods published in peer-reviewed journals. All data and methods are clearly indicated in the catalogue, in order to guarantee the maximum transparency of the compilation procedures. As compared to previous CPTI releases, the final CPTI15 catalogue shows a frequency–magnitude distribution coherent with current Italian instrumental catalogues, making it suitable for statistical analysis of the time-space property of the Italian seismicity.

Soil loss by erosion processes is one of the largest challenges for food production and reservoir siltation around the world. Information on sediment, nutrients and pollutants is required for designing effective control strategies. The estimation of sediment sources is difficult to get using conventional techniques, but sediment fingerprinting is a potentially valuable tool. This procedure intends to develop methods that enable to identify the apportionment of sediment sources from sediment mixtures. We developed a new tool to quantify the provenance of sediments in an agroforest catchment. For the first time, the procedure for the selection of the best combination of tracers was included in the tool package. An unmixing model algorithm is applied to the sediment samples to estimate the contribution of each possible source. The operations are compiled in an R package named FingerPro, which unmixes sediment samples after selecting the optimum set of tracers. An example from a well-studied Mediterranean catchment is included in the package to test the model. The sediment source apportionments are compared with previous results of soil redistributions where 137Cs derived rates validate the unmixing results, highlighting the potential of sediment fingerprinting for quantifying the main sediment provenance. Fingerprinting techniques will allow us to better comprehend sediment transport to water ecosystems and reservoirs and its detrimental effect on the quality of the water and aquatic habitats. The FingerPro package provides further understanding of the unmixing procedure through the use of graphical and statistical tools, offering a broader and easier application of the technique.

This paper investigates the anisotropic hydro-mechanical behaviour of Opalinus Clay shale, the host material currently being considered for the construction of a nuclear waste repository in Switzerland. Consolidated and drained triaxial tests on Opalinus Clay from the Mont Terri URL have been conducted in order to derive information on its strength and stiffness properties. Opalinus Clay specimens were tested both parallel to bedding (P-specimens) and perpendicular to bedding (S-specimens). The considered effective confining stress range (from 2 to 12 MPa) has been selected in order to reproduce possible in situ stress conditions for the repository. In this work, particular attention has been paid to the experimental procedure in order to ensure consolidated conditions and avoid generation of unwanted excess pore water pressure during drained shearing. The Skempton B parameter has been determined for all the tested specimens in order to ensure saturation. Both single-stage and multistage triaxial testing procedures were adopted in the experimental campaign. The results of the triaxial tests highlight an anisotropic elastic response of Opalinus Clay: S-specimens present a more compliant behaviour than P-specimens. The values of the Young modulus are found to increase with the increase in mean effective stress. The analysis of the peak and ultimate shear strength results reveals that the material behaves in a similar manner regardless of the considered direction of loading (P and S directions) with respect to the bedding orientation. Peak and ultimate failure envelopes for Opalinus Clay were derived for the investigated stress range.

In this work, we present a novel quantitative geographical information system-based procedure to obtain the magnitude (area) and frequency of medium to large first-time shallow slope failures. The procedure has been set up at the Barcedana Valley, in the Tremp Basin (Eastern Pyrenees). First, pixel-based susceptibility classes were defined using a slope stability index obtained with the physically based model SINMAP. The frequency calculated from the number of first-time failures recorded during the last 60 years was then assigned to each susceptibility class. We devised a procedure to estimate the size of potential failures by means of the aggregation of pixels within the boundaries of morphological slope units, optimized for the purpose. Finally, the landslide hazard was prepared using the magnitude-frequency matrix. Results show that a proper pixel clustering has been carried which avoids the generation of small groups of pixels with different susceptibility degrees within the same slope unit. For a given hill slope, the area of the cluster of pixels depends on the size of the slope unit, which is not unique as it depends on the criterion used to delineate them. Therefore, the latter is a key factor in the final results. In this study, we validated our results with the size distribution of the observed landslides. The methodology presented in this work can be applied using any susceptibility assessment method with a pixel-based output.

Slow-moving landslides yearly induce huge economic losses worldwide in terms of damage to facilities and interruption of human activities. Within the landslide risk management framework, the consequence analysis is a key step entailing procedures mainly based on identifying and quantifying the exposed elements, defining an intensity criterion and assessing the expected losses. This paper presents a two-scale (medium and large) procedure for vulnerability assessment of buildings located in areas affected by slow-moving landslides. Their intensity derives from Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) satellite data analysis, which in the last decade proved to be capable of providing cost-effective long-term displacement archives. The analyses carried out on two study areas of southern Italy (one per each of the addressed scales) lead to the generation, as an absolute novelty, of both empirical fragility and vulnerability curves for buildings in slow-moving landslide-affected areas. These curves, once further validated, can be valuably used as tools for consequence forecasting purposes and, more in general, for planning the most suitable slow-moving landslide risk mitigation strategies.