The aim of this article is to analyze the precise role of environmental civil liability in France. We do so by focusing on data from France, and claim that judges in fact seize hold of the possibility of combining regulation and civil liability. In other words, civil liability and regulation are...

Reasons for the joint use of ex ante regulation and ex pos t liability to cope with environmental accidents have been a longstanding issue in law and economics literature. This article, which includes the first empirical study of the French environmental legal system, analyzes courts’...