Il fondamento teorico della responsabilità del produttore

[Machine translation] The study concerns the discipline of liability for damage caused by defective products, governed by EU directive n. 2853/2024, which repeals dir. 374/85/EEC. The reform pursues the objectives of increasing the effectiveness of the legislation and of adapting it to information technologies and A.I. The study makes use of the experience gained by the author as an independent member of the group of experts that assisted the Commission in the work of preparing the reform. Both the 1985 directive and the reform are silent about the theoretical basis on which they were built. It is then up to the legal scholar to go and search, among the unspoken words, for the logical thread underlying the discourse and bring to light what was originally clear, in order to offer a yardstick on which the interpreter can measure the coherence of his decisions. Retracing the history of producer responsibility, starting from its origins in the American legal system, continuing with its arrival in Europe, it emerges that the first draft directives drafted by European institutions in the 1970s contained references to the legal theories developed by the doctrine in a period of great social fervor. The legislative framework echoes, keeping silent, the theory of business risk that circulated throughout Europe in the 1960s and which had been fully developed in Italy by Pietro Trimarchi, in the key of economic efficiency (in a historical period in which European jurists were not yet used to thinking in terms of the efficient allocation of resources), and by Stefano Rodotà, in an axiological perspective focused on the principle of social solidarity on which the legal system of all European countries is based, to a different extent, but equally irrepressible.