Abstract
"What is liability?". According to the Czech scholarship, this question has been proved unsolvable in the past 60 years.
The aim of this book is to suggest otherwise. Currently, a dominant Czech approach to liability is the so-called theory of sanction: liability is a secondary duty imposed due to a breach of a primary duty.
At the same time, however, liability is conceptualized as an active institute, i.e. as liability to fulfil an obligation. This bring us to a specifically "Czech" problem of liability-a paradoxical situation in which a man can be liable because he was sanctioned, and he also can be sanctioned because he was liable.
Liability in this sense seems to be an inherently flawed and meaningless concept, since both theories aspire to describe liability to the same extent (co-extensively). The most recent trend in Czech legal theory is thus a sceptical approach that completely eliminates the concept of liability from legal discourse.
This is contrary to an ongoing and presumably meaningful debate on liability in foreign (ie non-Czech) literature that supports the most recent analytical and normative approaches to European legal regulation and its developments. Unlike in the Czech language, this literature usually treats liability (Haftung) and responsibility (Verantwortung) as two discrete concepts.
But why is this so? Where does the "Czech" problem of liability come from? Where it began? Where does even liability come from? Has liability always been so paradoxical? Why Czech terminology does not distinguish between liability and responsibility and how this affect Czech legal thinking? What are the reasons of the "Czech" problem of liability? Can we solve this problem? A what is the role of the new Czech Civil Code in this solution? Is it even possible for liability to have a proper meaning? And if it has a proper meaning, what does this theoretical conception of liability look like? The aim of this book is to answer all of the outlined questions.