Civil and criminal liability: in search of a lost coherence

Studying two separate disciplines, such as Civil and Criminal liability, it would not be expected to find any interactions between them: Civil Law repairs the damage caused to private interests; while Criminal Law punishes, thereby ensuring public interests. These differences in purpose justify a hierarchy of disciplines resulting in the supremacy of Criminal Law over Civil Law. However, it will be shown that the legislature and the judge are going in the wrong direction by considering that there is a difference of degree between Civil Law and Criminal Law where there is actually a difference in nature. This incorrect assumption has given rise to a widespread confusion where each discipline takes ownership of the considerations of the other: Civil Law becomes punitive, while, at the same time, Criminal Law becomes increasingly compensatory. The present work aims to denounce a double danger: first, Criminal Law abandons its protective function of public interests when it attempts to repair purely individual damages; second, a punitive Civil Law, detached from the fundamental safeguards that are attached to criminal matters, may prove to be a threat to individual freedoms. This cross-movement between the two disciplines jeopardizes the consistency of their respective systems: reciprocal influences must be revealed in order to better understand the weaknesses of legal liability and to propose remedies that ensure a consistent and complementary arrangement of legal rules.