If Chapter 3 situated the problems facing contemporary tort law within EU law, it did not provide a comprehensive or novel model of liability. In Chapter 4, the key argument is that network liability in its incipient form can be detected in the law on 'private' gatekeepers of product liability, and this model can and should be applied equally to the state through reimagining Francovich liability. This move will also assist in developing the liability criteria, and the concept of a sufficient serious breach of EU law offers a coherent and normatively principled standard for the liability of secondary actors in public/private governance networks. It is then underlined that different existing models of liability should be understood as different means of recovery in networks. The central point is that these three models of liability – individual, organisational and network – should be placed within a more encompassing normative concept of network responsibility. This model of responsibility can, and should, be applied beyond the context of product liability as a template for solving problems of attribution and imputation in governance networks. The idea is tested in the context of value chain liability.

The Introduction situates the book in a broader context of tort theory. The key argument advanced is that with the rise of transnational regulation and law-making, the settled academic debates in tort theory, whether corrective justice theory or law and economics, are inadequate explanations of the social role and function of tort law today. The Introduction, then, develops an alternative theoretical framework for tort law rooted in Ladeurian systems theory, which focues on the societal role of private (tort) law. The basic argument is that it is not feasible or convincing to present tort law apart from its societal knowledge base from which it draws its models of liability. It is then argued that when tort law is understood in its societal role at a transnational and European level, new theoretical insights and models of liability can be perceived. The new model that emerges at a European level in products’ liability case law is a form of network responsibility, which focuses on the role of peripheral parties to torts, which fulfil normatively secondary roles in the society of networks. This can become a wider template for tort liability in governance networks, and this argument will be deepened in Chapter 4 using examples from value chain liability.