I have an application that can run on both Tomcat 6 and Tomcat 7.
I have noticed that bean validation 1.1 only works with Tomcat 7.

I was not sure if it is a known limitation or a bug so I've discussed it with Emmanuel Bernard who suggested that I open an issue so you guys can investigate.

I've tried out with a few versions of Hibernate Validator and I understand it stops working from version 5.0.0.Beta1.

If you would like to reproduce the issue, it's pretty easy: just clone Spring-Petclinic [1], change the version of hibernate-validator in the POM to 5.0.0.Beta1 and run on a servlet 2.6 container.

[1] https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-petclinic