1. Legislation in the 19th century

Yet, while the leading luminaries of the pandectist school of thought were engaged in their study of Ulpian and Papinian,^{[5935] [5936] the world around them changed dramatically.}

The Industrial Revolution led to an unprecedented "acceleration of history" and brought with it untold new sources of risk and losses.^[5937]' From the 1830s monstrous machines called railway engines²⁶¹ steamed through the German territories, pulling carriages for the transportation of goods and persons but, occasionally, also wreaking death and destruction around them.^[5938] The advent of machinery and urbanization facilitated the production processes; but at the same time these developments brought with them a vastly increased potential for danger. Workmen became involved in hazardous mining ventures or had to handle menacing blast furnaces and combustion engines; and an explosion in a factory, or a burst of sparks from an engine in a densely populated area could obviously have disastrous consequences. In many cases of this kind it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove negligence on the part of the person in charge of the installation and hence it became manifest, at least to more practically minded lawyers, that new patterns of loss adjustment had to be devised. As early as 1838 (a mere three years after the first railway line on any German territory^[5939] and a mere four days (!) after the first one operating in Prussia^[5940] had been opened) a rather revolutionary step was taken by the Prussian legislature: it introduced a special statute imposing strict liability on railways for all harm to persons or property occurring "through carriage on the railway"; the defendant could exonerate himself only by showing that the harm had been caused through the fault of the victim or by an external and unavoidable event.^[5941] This pioneering piece of legislation triggered off similar statutes in other German states,^[5942] and when in 1871 the Empire was founded, the imperial parliament followed suit almost immediately. The "imperial law of liability"^{[5943] [5944] [5945]}—which, albeit under another name and in a substantially expanded form, is still in force today—provided for strict liability for harm to persons²⁶⁸ arising "through the operation" of a railway.²'⁷ The same statute made factory-owners liable for the fault of senior employees.^[5946] Mention must also be made, in this context, of Bismarck's famous system of workmen's compensation for industrial accidents; it, too, constituted a rather radical deviation from the principle of letting losses lie where they had fallen, unless they were attributable to somebody else's fault;^[5947] in this case, however, a social insurance scheme, rather than strict liability on the part of the factory-owner, provided the solution.^[5948]

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More on the topic 1. Legislation in the 19th century:

1. The change of opinion in the 19th century
2. 20th-century ad hoc legislation
3. The Law of the Twelve Tables and the Rise of Legislation
4. Statute law and delegated legislation
5. Justinian’s legislation on marriage
6. Imperial Legislation
7. Imperial Legislation
8. The Demise of Popular Legislation
9. Forfeiture in the Second Century ad
10. The role of the senate in legislation
11. Augustan legislation on marriage