Abstract EN:

The problems of civil liability linked to mentally ill people have always been a matter of peculiar importance among judicial and administrative precedents. This particularity concerns as much the litigation of the damage which they have sustained as that related to the damage which they have caused, and this, because of their status and their highly complex personality. It is therefore by taking those factors into account that the judges of the two orders of jurisdiction are led to rule on matters as various as unjustified hospitalization, the problems of the protection of mentally ill people from themselves, or else the implication of third parties by the victims of their wrongdoing. Harsher towards the plantiffs than his counterpart of the judicial order in the first place, the administrative judge has noticeably softened his positions afterwards, sometimes even choosing solutions much more profitable than those decided upon by the civil judge. The steady coming together of the precedents of the two orders of jurisdiction, putting aside the still overcautions attitude of the administrative judge in terms of the policing of insane persons, perfectly fits into the general frame of the evolution of the civil liability law which is characterized by a continuous reduction of the spheres of non responsability.