Someone's child damaged my property: what the law says in six jurisdictions
France holds parents liable de plein droit, Germany only for their own failure to supervise, and California and New York cap the bill at $25,000 and $5,000. England has no rule at all — and that is the finding, not a gap.
The problem
A twelve-year-old scratched the whole side of a car parked in the courtyard while playing. The parents say they were not there, that they cannot control what he does out of their sight, and that it is nothing to do with them. The owner of the car wants to know who pays for the respray, and whether "we weren't there" is actually an answer anywhere.
What they agree on
Five of these six systems put an adult in the frame for what a child did, and none of the five makes the victim prove the adult was careless. That is the shared starting point: the claimant establishes the child, the act and the loss, and the burden then shifts. In Italy the parent escapes "soltanto se provano di non aver potuto impedire il fatto". In Spain liability ceases only where the responsible person proves they used "toda la diligencia de un buen padre de familia". In Germany the supervisor must show they met the supervision duty or that the damage would have happened anyway. In France and in the two American statutes the parent has nothing of the kind to prove because there is nothing available to prove. Nowhere is "we weren't there" a fact the victim has to disprove.
In all five the child's own liability sits alongside the adult's rather than being replaced by it. The Italian page notes that a minor capable of understanding answers under the general law of tort; the Spanish page speaks of concurrent liability; Germany's § 828 decides separately whether the child is answerable, with no liability under seven and special road-traffic rules to ten; and both American statutes make the parent jointly and severally liable with the minor or leave the child's own exposure untouched. The German page draws the uncomfortable conclusion honestly: it is entirely possible for the supervision duty to have been met and the child to be too young to answer, in which case nobody pays and the victim carries the loss.
None of these provisions is insurance. The damage must be proved and quantified in every one of them, and in several the practical answer runs through a household liability policy rather than through the code — with the important qualification that a deliberate act is exactly what liability insurers tend to exclude, which California addresses in the section itself. Whether a particular incident was deliberate, who had custody at the time, and which route the claim runs on are questions for a lawyer in the relevant country.
Where they part company
| Jurisdiction | What its law does | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Italia | Italy and Spain occupy the middle and are closer to France than to Germany. Italy's escape is proving the act could not have been prevented, which the page notes is commonly referred not only to supervision in the narrow sense but to the upbringing given. Spain's is proving "toda" the diligence of a good family head — the whole of it — with the burden on the responsible person and, as the Spanish page puts it, an exoneration that rarely succeeds. | Both look like defences and behave like near-strict liability. The distinction from Germany is not the existence of an escape route but how much of it survives contact with a court, and that difference is written into the wording — "could not have prevented" and "all the diligence" are far more demanding standards than "met the supervision duty". |
| France | France is the strictest on its face. Art. 1242 makes parents exercising parental authority "de plein droit, solidairement responsables du dommage causé par leurs enfants mineurs", and the only exception the sentence names is a child entrusted to a third party by an administrative or judicial decision. The article nonetheless still carries an older sentence a few lines later — "La responsabilité ci-dessus a lieu, à moins que les parents et les artisans ne prouvent qu'ils n'ont pu empêcher le fait". | The two sentences pull in opposite directions inside one article, which is precisely why what a French parent can actually argue is settled by case law rather than read off the text. A reader in a live French case should take the article to a French lawyer rather than pick whichever sentence suits them. |
| The French article is doing several jobs at once. Its opening sentence — responsibility for damage caused by things one has in one's keeping — is the foundation the courts built the whole French regime of liability for things on, and a separate paragraph carries a special rule for fire, with a further exception for the relationship between landlord and tenant under arts. 1733 and 1734. | Citing "article 1242" says almost nothing on its own. Which paragraph applies, and in the case of the general rule who counts as the gardien — the person with use, direction and control at the time, who may be a tenant or a borrower rather than the owner — is where a French case is won or lost. | |
| Deutschland | Germany is asking a different question from everyone else. § 832 is liability for the supervisor's own presumed failure, not for the child: no duty to compensate "wenn er seiner Aufsichtspflicht genügt oder wenn der Schaden auch bei gehöriger Aufsichtsführung entstanden sein würde". And the yardstick is what supervision this child needed — age, character, and the specific danger. The German page says the familiar sign "Eltern haften für ihre Kinder" misstates the law. | It is a real defence and it is regularly available. A primary-school child who has behaved reliably does not have to be watched continuously while playing outside; where a particular danger exists, or the child has already been in trouble, the requirements rise. No other member runs that inquiry, and it is the reason a German parent and an Italian parent facing the same broken window are not in the same position. |
| España | Every European member catches people beyond parents, and catches different ones. Spain's art. 1903 is the widest: tutors, curators with full representative powers who live with the supported person, employers for what employees do "en el servicio de los ramos en que los tuvieran empleados, o con ocasión de sus funciones", and non-university schools for pupils under teacher supervision during school and extracurricular activities. Italy adds precettori and those teaching a trade, for pupils and apprentices "nel tempo in cui sono sotto la loro vigilanza". France adds commettants and instituteurs and artisans — with a twist in the final paragraph, that the fault of instituteurs must be proved by the claimant under the ordinary law. Germany's § 832(2) extends the identical liability to anyone who takes supervision on by contract. | The French reversal is the sharpest of these: schoolteachers are the one category the article deliberately puts back under the ordinary burden of proof, so an incident at school is a different case from an incident in the street. And New York goes the other way again, excluding the state, a local social services department and foster parents by name. |
| California | The two American statutes only reach deliberate acts. California imputes "Any act of willful misconduct of a minor"; New York requires the child to have "willfully, maliciously, or unlawfully damaged, defaced or destroyed" the property, or to have taken property from a building with intent to deprive, or to have made a false report or placed a false bomb. Carelessness by a child is outside both. | It splits the group cleanly at the threshold. The four European members do not distinguish: a child's unlawful act is the trigger however it came about. A ball through a window is inside art. 2048, § 832, art. 1903 and art. 1242, and outside § 1714.1 and § 3-112 unless it was thrown deliberately. |
| Only the American members put a ceiling on the money, and it is low. California: $25,000 for each tort of the minor, and where the claim is injury to a person the imputed liability is further confined to medical, dental and hospital expenses actually incurred within that same ceiling. The Judicial Council must adjust both figures every two years for the California Consumer Price Index and publish them, so the $25,000 printed in the section is not the operative number. Subdivision (e) caps an insurer's exposure for the imputed liability at $10,000. | A serious injury or a substantial repair exhausts the statute quickly, and the figure a reader finds in the text is out of date by design. The four European members carry no ceiling whatever — the parent answers for the loss. | |
| The Californian cap has a hole in it that the section states in terms: the imputed liability "is in addition to any liability now imposed by law". A claim that the parent was themselves negligent — in supervision, or in giving a child something dangerous — runs under § 1714 and is not capped by § 1714.1 at all. | It reverses the usual advice. The statute that looks like the obvious route is the capped one, and the uncapped route is the ordinary negligence claim the statute was supposed to supplement. Which one a claim runs on is a strategic choice, not a formality. | |
| New York | New York's cap is $5,000, whatever the loss, and the section reaches property only — it does not cover personal injury at all. It then builds in a means test running the other way: before entering a judgment of $500 or more the court must give the parent an opportunity to apply on financial inability, hear it summarily and decide on the balance of probabilities, entering judgment within the parent's capacity but never below $500 where the original total exceeded it. | New York is the only jurisdiction in the comparison where the parent's ability to pay is part of the decision. Everywhere else the loss is the loss, and what the defendant can afford is an enforcement problem rather than a liability one. |
| New York says out loud the thing every other system leaves to argument: "In no event shall it be a defense that the parent or legal guardian has exercised due diligent supervision" — permitted only as a mitigating circumstance in the interests of justice. In exchange it gives two defences nobody else has: that restitution has already been paid under the named Family Court Act or Penal Law provisions, and that the child had voluntarily and without good cause left home and refused to submit to the parent's guidance and control before and at the time of the damage. | Careful parenting is the entire defence in Germany, a hard-fought one in Italy and Spain, and expressly no defence at all in New York. The runaway-child defence is the mirror image: New York excuses the parent who has genuinely lost control, which is the one situation German law would treat as raising the supervision requirements rather than removing them. | |
| Only New York draws an age band in the statute: the parent or guardian of "an infant over ten and less than eighteen years of age". Below eleven the section does not apply. The others define the relationship instead. Italy requires unemancipated minors "che abitano con essi" — cohabitation is a written condition. Spain requires children "bajo su guarda". France requires the parent to be exercising parental authority. Germany requires a statutory duty to supervise a person who needs it because of minority or physical or mental condition. | The trigger conditions decide who gets sued in a separated family, and they are not interchangeable. An Italian parent the child does not live with is outside art. 2048 on the face of it; a French parent exercising parental authority is inside art. 1242 regardless; a New York parent of a nine-year-old is outside § 3-112 entirely. | |
| New York alone limits who may claim. § 3-112 names a public officer, organisation or authority having by law the care or custody of public property, or a private individual or organisation having care, custody or ownership of private property — with the definitions reaching school boards and, for damage to a grave, the next of kin. It is a property-damage statute with a defined class of claimants. | The other five are open to any victim of any loss the child caused. New York's is drafted around the school window and the graffitied wall, which is a different instrument aimed at a different problem. |
The provision in each country
Each card links to the page that reproduces the official text and explains it in that country's own language.
Italia Codice Civile
France Code civil
Deutschland BGB
España Código Civil
California California Civil Code
Where there is no answer in the code
A jurisdiction listed here is a finding, not a gap. Either its answer lives outside the corpus — special legislation, case law, municipal rules — or its law simply has no such rule.
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United Kingdom
The courts answer it
The parent's own negligence
The most interesting absence in this comparison, because it is the law rather than a missing page. In England a parent is not vicariously liable for a child's torts at all. Liability arises only where the parent was themselves negligent — in supervising, or in putting something dangerous in a child's hands — and that is a common-law negligence claim, not a statutory provision. A lookup over the Acts this section carries returned nothing, which is the correct answer rather than a gap.
That's the law in seven places. Now let's settle your problem.
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This page compares provisions of several legal systems in general terms and links to the official text of each. It is not legal advice, it does not tell you which country's law governs your situation, and it takes no account of the circumstances of your case. For a live dispute, consult a qualified lawyer in the jurisdiction concerned.