linguistic:paraphrasing, structural:scholar_edition, structural:summarization
Europe

Other obstacles—especially in civil law countries—include high filing fees, no right to a jury trial, low damages for pain and suffering, the unavailability of punitive damages, and the unavailability (before the 2010s) of class actions. As of 2003, there was no country outside of the United States where plaintiffs were able to recover noneconomic damages above US$300,000 for even the most catastrophic injuries. As of 2015, product liability in Europe "has remained a fairly minor field which generates fewer cases, more modest awards, and rarely makes it into the headlines" (in comparison to its American cousin). In July 2018, European Commission staff reported that from 2000 to 2016, a total of only 798 product liability claims had been filed in the national courts of EU member states. As of 2020, the much smaller number of cases in the UK meant that "English case law ha barely begun to consider" many of the product liability issues already explored thoroughly by American courts, which therefore required an English legal treatise to cite to a "significant proportion" of American cases in order to illustrate where English product liability law could go in the future.