Extra-contractual cost recovery by public authorities

Under the supervision of prof. dr. Ilse Samoy and prof. dr. Steven Lierman Christopher Borucki conducted PhD research on extra-contractual cost recovery by public authorities, which sits astride the boundary between private and public law. The central question of the research is whether public authorities may recover the expenses of their obligations from individual citizens (e.g. costs of firefighting, policing, preventing and remedying environmental damage, etc.). Is it possible to speak of 'injury' if a public authority 'merely' does what it is created to do in the public interest and, thus, is allocated public funds to that purpose? If so, when exactly is the diminution of its patrimony legally relevant? How do French law  Dutch law and the law of the United States tackle these questions? The research reveals that the current legal response to these questions can be more finely tuned and differs depending on whether the public authority is fulfilling a duty that only it may or can fulfill or is filling the shoes of the citizen. In the former case, one encounters a hard political boundary whose position differs as a result of various policy arguments in the legal systems studied. In the latter case, it is ‘obvious’ that public authorities make costs on behalf of the individual citizen, although the citizen is not without legal recourse against a claim for cost recovery.