The Institute for European Tort Law (ETL) was founded as a Research Unit on 1 July 2002 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As of 1 July 2008, the Research Unit was upgraded to an Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Institute of European Tort Law conducts comparative legal research in tort law. Its primary focus is on the European legal systems. It also examines other jurisdictions such as, for example, the USA, South Africa, Israel, Japan and Korea.

The aim of the Institute is to add to the level of knowledge of the legal systems of the European Union and to establish an understanding of the different solutions to legal problems, in particular, in furtherance of the approximation of the tort laws in Europe. This demonstrates the importance of a dogmatic and thorough consideration of the existing European legal cultures.

As part of a comprehensive comparative legal study of the core questions of tort law, the differences and similarities in the European legal orders are beeing analyzed.

The Institute assists the “European Group on Tort Law”, an international group of tort law experts, in the drafting of the “Principles of European Tort Law”. The work has also already been drawn upon in the new draft for Austrian tort law.

The projects of the Institute are important steps towards the investigation and development of a European tort law. The central idea of the “Principles of European Tort Law”, to determine by way of examination and comparison the doctrines underlying the tort law decisions of the European courts, is furthered by the “National Court Practice and European Tort Law” project. Other studies deal with fundmental aspectsof redress for losses in a comparative perspective.

The Institute co-operates with individual experts and institutions working in the tort law field, in particular with the aforementioned “European Group on Tort Law”, the European Centre for Tort and Insurance Law (ECTIL) in Vienna, the European Institute for Transnational Legal Studies (METRO) in Maastricht, the Centre for European Private Law (CEP) in Münster, the Observatory of European and Comparative Private Law of the University of Girona and the Korean Research Group for European Legal Studies. 

Together with ECTIL, the Institute has published the series “Tort and Insurance Law” with Springer (Wien/New York), now containing over 20 volumes. As a sub-series, the “Tort and Insurance Law Yearbooks”, contains, in addition to reports on core topics of tort law, reports on the developments in tort law in the previous year in nearly all the European legal systems.