A private nuisance is an act or omission by D which constitutes a violation of C’s real property rights, entailing either an interference with C’s legal interest in the land (including some easement or other right which C possesses in connection with that land) or an interference with the amenity of the land, i.e., C’s right to use and enjoy that land.

The European Union law grants the right to claim for damages to anyone harmed by an antitrust infringement, be they consumers, undertakings or public authorities. A competition law infringement may cause economic harm simultaneously to several market participants. Economic harms may indeed flow from an antitrust infringement in the form of price overcharges or other economic loss – for instance, lost profits or lost chances. Tort laws generally establish the liability of the infringer through the principle of corrective justice, based on which the wrongdoer has a duty to repair only the wrongful losses that his or her conduct has caused. Along these lines, the principle of corrective justice dispenses a general rule whereby a person harmed by a tort must be able to recover damages to restore the same situation, at least from an economic perspective, existing before the breach.

National courts have generally embraced a multifold account for causation in virtually all Member States. However, the different national tort law systems structure the multi-stage accounts differently. National judges enforce competition law rules largely relying on their domestic laws of obligations. For this reason, this chapter examines the bundle of tort law and competition law that applies to establish causation in competition damages actions before national courts of England, Germany, France and Italy. These four jurisdictions were selected because of the size of their economies, the amount of litigation and the fact that they show four different, almost paradigmatic, approaches to causation.