The Carrier’s Defence to Liability for Delay under the Montreal Convention and EU Regulation 261/2004
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyses the specific defence to liability for delay available to carriers, comparing its features under the Montreal Convention (MC99) and EU Regulation 261/2004 (Regulation 261). The relationship between these legal instruments has never been an easy one, whereas recent case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the socalled ‘extraordinary circumstances defence’ invites to explore similarities and differences between the international and the European approaches. The scope of application of the defence is clearer in Regulation 261 than in MC99. The former will only affect cancellations and delays – not cases of denied boarding, and its impact remains limited to the lump-sum compensation set out in Article 7 of Regulation 261. In turn, MC99 covers delays, but it is uncertain whether it also encompasses cancellations and situations of denied boarding – particularly when the passengers concerned are provided alternate transportation. Moreover, the defence laid down in MC99 applies to damage occasioned by delay, but the definition of ‘damage’ is left to domestic law. This situation gives rise to diverging decisions by national courts. Regarding the conceptualization of the defence, the wording of the relevant provisions might lead to think that both instruments share a regime of liability for presumed culpability. However, the extraordinary circumstances defence is much more complex. As a consequence, there is no alignment between MC99 and Regulation 261, although points of convergence are highlighted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".