This essay deals with product safety and liability, looking in particular at theinteraction between regulation, contract and civil liability. Risk definition, assessmentand management in product safety has changed in the last 20 years, and a wellrecognised role is played by private actors both in standard setting, in monitoring andrisk management concerning post sale duties. Post-market surveillance has become acrucial part of the risk management strategies, but the regulatory dimension has notbeen sufficiently linked with that of governance.In the first part, I examine the current review of product safety at EU level withthe proposed regulation on market surveillance and its relationship with the broaderdebate concerning better regulation.In the second part, I show the increasing contractualisation of standard-settingconcerning safety and product defectiveness, which influences both regulation and civilliability systems. In both cases, however, insufficient attention has been given to theimplications of such a contractualisation for liability standards.I then move to information duties in product safety and product liability andclaimed that business models of the supply and distribution chain may be affected bythe regulatory design concerning product safety. I contend that a reform of the GeneralProduct Safety Directive and Product Liability directive should promote the creation ofmore structured information networks, aimed at making information production andtransmission concerning product safety more effective. Enterprises should beconstrained by the safety goals, but they should enjoy discretion in choosingorganisational models that best fit with their business models. In particular, thedistinction between hierarchical and horizontal networks should be fruitfully employedto design default rules organising the information safety network. This would beparticularly important for pan-European networks which have to coordinate enterprisesoperating in different legal systems with different institutional frameworks. I propose tointroduce default rules concerning information networks that parties can adjust to theirspecific business models.Private law and regulation interplay in the field of product safety. Not only ithappens between administrative regulation and civil liability, as it has long beenrecognised, but also with contract law, given the increasing contractualization ofstandard-setting and the necessity to build contractual networks to implementmonitoring of product safety in modern market economies. These examples suggest thatthe current approach to harmonisation of European Private Law is limited and does notreflect the necessity to coordinate different instruments to pursue unitary policyobjectives: producing higher and more effective product safety in Europe at reasonablecosts.
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