Elected Member

Prof. Dr. Miquel Martin-Casals

Girona, Spain
Institute of European and Comparative Law, Universitat de Girona
Education
Institut Vicens Vives
Barcelona University Law School, Licenciado en Derecho (1978), Doctor en Derecho (1984)

Miquel Martin-Casals is Professor of Civil Law at the University of Girona (Girona, Spain) and former director of the Institute of European and Comparative Private Law at this university.
He studied law at the University of Barcelona, where he graduated in 1978 and received a doctorate, with the extraordinary prize award, in 1984. He has also been Visiting Scholar in Germany at the Max-Planck Institutes of Frankfurt and Hamburg and in the United States at the University of California (Berkeley).
He has published around one hundred and eighty papers on Tort Law, Contract Law, Legislative Drafting and Family Law. He is member of the editorial board of several legal journals in Spain (InDret, Revista de Derecho Privado, Práctica de Derecho de Daños, Revista Catalana de Dret Privat), the Netherlands (European Review of Private Law) and member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of European Tort Law (Austria).
He has been a member of the Busnelli-Lucas Study Group on Personal Injury in the European Union (1999-2001), of the Drafting Committee of the ‘Principles of European Tort Law (PETL) (2003-2005), and of the Stirring Committee of the Project ‘Legal Development in Europe’ of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) (2005-2010). He is a member of the Academic Committee the Institute for European Traffic Law (IETL) and  of the Advisory Board of the ‘European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law’ (ECTIL) in Vienna. He is member of the "European Group on Tort Law (EGTL)" since 1998.
He is also a member of PEOPIL (Pan European Personal Injury Lawyers) and honorary member of the Spanish "Asociación Española de Abogados Especializados en Responsabilidad Civil y Seguro". Finally, he is also a member of the "Group de Recherche Européen sur la Responsabilité Civile et l’Assurance (GRERCA)", a French speaking research group which mainly includes French and Belgian researchers involved in the reform of French and Belgian Tort Law. In 2011, Professor Martin-Casals  was elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law in The Hague.
Professor Martin-Casals has been chairperson of the Committee of Experts for the reform of the "System for assessing damages for personal injury caused in traffic accidents"’, a Commission created in 2010 by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the Soanish Ministry of Justice in order to study the reform of the Spanish system, popularly known as the "baremo".  This Commission prepared the preliminary draft of the Act 35/2015, of 22. September, which reformed the "baremo" system in depth and which entered into force on 1. January 2016. Currently he is the chairperson of the Working Legal Group and of the Ex Post Assessment Group of the Follow-Up Commission to this Act appointed by the Spanish Ministry of Justice and the General Directorate of Insurance and Pension Funds. 
In recognition of his work he has received, on an individual basis, the European Lawyer of the Year Award in the area of personal injury (PEOPIL, 2015), the Magistrate Ruiz Vadillo Award (Asociación Española de Abogados Especializados, 2015) and the Cross of Honour of the Order of San Raimundo de Peñafort, at the request of the Spanish Ministry of Justice (2015). As a collective recognition, he has also received the Inade Foundation Award, granted to the Committee of Experts that prepared the preliminary Bill Draft of the Act 35/2015.

Some of his recent publications in English include:

  • Miquel Martin-Casals (ed.), The Borderlines of Tort Law: Interactions with Contract Law, Intersentia, 2019, ISBN 978-1-78068-248-8.
  • Miquel Martín-Casals, “Causation and Scope of Liability in the Internet of Things (IoT)”, in Sebastian Lohsse, Reiner Schulze and Dirk Staudenmayer (eds.), Liability for Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things - Münster Colloquia on EU Law and the Digital Economy IV, Nomos, 2019, pp. 201-228, ISBN 9781509925858.
  • Miquel Martin-Casals / Diego Papayanis (eds.), Uncertain Causation in Tort Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1107128361.
  • Miquel Martín-Casals, “The Principles of European Tort Law (PETL) at the beginning of a second decade”, in Paula Giliker, Research Handbook on EU Tort Law, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017, pp. 361-391, ISBN 978-1785365713.
  • Miquel Martin-Casals, “A new Spanish compensation scheme for death and personal injury resulting from road traffic accidents”, in Essays in Honour of / Huldiginsbundel vir Johann Neethling, Durban: Lexis-Nexis 2015, pp. 301-322. ISBN 978-0-409-12449-1.
Prof. Dr. Miquel Martin-Casals Image
Areas of Expertise
Tort Law
Contracts Law
Family Law