Roman roots as formative of the liability for effusum vel deiectum in the selected legal systems including the Polish Civil Code of the 23rd of April 1964

The objects that fell off certain premises, were poured out or thrown away from them, may easily cause injury to the persons passing in the road situated nearby. In such cases the detection of the direct perpetrator is naturally difficult. Hence there emerges a question whether the liability for doing this kind of harm should not be based upon the objective criteria and thus made independent of guilt. It is in the first part of this paper that the author, while drawing upon the selected legal systems, tries to answer this question. The second, major part of the paper, discusses the Roman roots of the provisions contained in Art. 433 of the Polish Civil Code. While analysing the Roman law sources as well as the views adopted by the Polish research and court decisions, the author arrives at a conclusion that Roman law contains numerous universal elements. These elements prove perfectly suitable for being applied in the circumstances totally different from those in which they came to being