Instrumente vechi pentru probleme noi. Prejudiciile în masă faţă-n faţă cu răspunderea civilă. Convergenţă sau antinomie?
Old instruments for new issues. Mass damages face to face with civil liability. Is it about convergence or antinomy?

Summary/Abstract: Being meant to restore the social relations which were altered by an illicit deed, civil liability was always bound to adapt to the new realities in order to achieve its goal. Now it is facing one of the biggest challenges ever: mass torts. Seen by some as a side effect of modern life, the mass torts give a new dimension to the idea of civil wrong. Often, when they occur, they shake society and legal systems from their foundations, creating true social anguish or general feelings of vulnerability and insecurity. Even when they are more discrete, hiding behind a massive fragmentation, mass torts question the capacity of legal system to properly protect the subjective rights of individuals. In this context, the way in which civil liability responds to the challenges of mass torts could not be left out of the debate. As so, after a review of the circumstances that have potentiated the emergence and proliferation of mass torts, in particular the generalization of globalism and the mass society, starting from comparative law, we have tried to conceptualize the notion of mass torts, and concluded that they are characterized by the existence of a large number of victims, who share multiple common features, by the incidence of a public interest concurrent with the one of the victims and the trans substantial nature of the damage. Then, we have analysed the challenges that mass torts raise in relation to the functions and conditions of the civil liability, underlining, in particular, the tension points. In the end the attention was directed towards some reactions and adaptations to the mass torts, mainly highlighting the tendency for the recognition of new types of subjective rights, for the establishment of special regimes of civil liability and for the creation of special funds to compensate the victims, in order to bypass the mechanisms of civil liability.

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