One of the most important characteristics of today’s private law is that it increasingly flows from different sources: Next to national legislation and case law, it is also shaped by European and supranational sources and rapidly becoming a mixture of differently oriented rules and principles. This development can be described as one from coherence to fragmentation. The aim of the new book is to consider how this important shift has worked out in different subfields of the law like in contract and property law, in competition, insurance, marketing and private international law as well as in the law of intellectual property. This cross-disciplinary approach shows how pervasive legal fragmentation has become, and points out how to remedy the adverse effects it brings with it. The volume is therefore indispensable for anyone interested in how Europeanisation affects national private laws.

The notion of private law, as opposed to public law, has a long tradition and is of great importance in most EU Member States. National private law is seen as the constitution of civil society and enjoys a high degree of democratic legitimacy with regard to social justice. However, that distinction is not so important in EU law, where EU legislative competences in any given field of law are limited to those explicitly provided for in the Treaties. There is thus no general EU competence to regulate private law in its entirety, but a number of specific competences addressing selected aspects. The clash between coherent national systems of private law and the EU's functionalist approach leads inevitably to a fragmentation of EU legislation regarding private law. This poses a challenge to the coherence of national systems of private law, with adverse effects not only on consistency, but also transparency and legal security. Of potential options for restoring coherence to private law, the only feasible one is through spontaneous harmonisation. This can occur as a spill-over of EU law rules and principles, through national legislatures and judiciaries. But above all, it is likely to happen through the framing of national and EU private law within a common grid of concepts, principles and rules.

Situated within the context of the ongoing debate about European contract law, this book provides a detailed examination of the European Union's competence in the field of contract law. It analyses the limits of Union competence in relation to several relevant Treaty provisions which potentially confer competence on the Union to adopt a comprehensive contract law instrument and the exercise of Union competence in connection with the operation of the principles of subsidiarity, proportionality and sincere cooperation. It also explores the viability of several alternative and complementary routes to the adoption of such an instrument, including enhanced cooperation, an intergovernmental treaty and certain American techniques. Setting forth an elaborate account of the context for this debate and its chronological development at the European level, this book charts the discussions relating to the European Union's competence to regulate contract law and offers a comparative analysis of the approach taken to the approximation of contract law in the American setting. Setting forth a detailed account of the context for this debate and its chronological development at the European level, the book charts the discussions that have occurred within and outside the EU relating to the transnational competence to regulate contract law. Situating European constitutional law within the continued debate about European contract law, it also reflects upon the contract law structure of the United States and examines the viability of alternative and complementary routes to the adoption of a comprehensive instrument of substantive contract law.

An edited volume exploring the interaction between EU external relations law and private law, examining how the relationship has affected the evolution of the EU's competence, the extent of EU private law's reach beyond the boundaries of an internal market, and how the EU contributes to the formation of private regulation at an international level.

There have been an increasing need for greater integration of many Asian economies, either within the confines of ASEAN or on a more geo-economically strategic scale including major Asian jurisdictions like China, Japan, and Korea. A number of key personalities within the regional legal fraternity have advanced views that such integration ought to occur through the harmonization of legal rules, arguing that in doing so, uncertainty and other transaction costs would be reduced and commercial confidence within the region concomitantly increased. This edited volume brings together eminent and promising scholars and practitioners to investigate what convergence and divergence means in their respective fields and for Asia. Interwoven in the details of each tale of convergence is whether and how convergence ought to take place, and in so choosing, what are the attendant consequences for that choice.

This book asks what is European consumer access to justice, and how we can improve it by means of procedural and substantive laws?

The Research Handbook on EU Consumer and Contract Lawtakes stock of the evolution of this fascinating area of private law to date and identifies key themes for the future development of the law and research agendas. This major Handbook brings together contributions by leading academics from across the EU on the latest developments and controversies in these important areas of law. The Handbookis divided into three distinct and thematic parts: firstly, authors examine a range of cross-cutting issues relevant to both consumer and contract law. The second part discusses specific topics on EU consumer law, including the consumer image within EU law, information duties and unfair contract terms. The final part focuses on a number of important subjects which remain current in the development of EU contract law and presents a number of innovative solutions to the challenges presented in parts one and two. This timely and insightful Handbook will provide both a comprehensive survey of this area of law for the novice researcher and fresh food-for-thought for scholars who have been researching this area of law for many years. Contributors include:E.A. Amayuelas, H. Beale, J.M. Bech Serrat, C. Busch, R. Canavan, P. Cartwright, O.O. Cherednychenko, G. Comparato, G. Cordero-Moss, A. Cygan, L. Gillies, M. Graziadei, M.W. Hesselink, G. Howells, C. Mak, V. Mak, H.-W. Micklitz, B. Pozzo, P. Rott, J. Rutgers, J.M. Smits, Y. Svetiev, E.T.T. Tai, C. Twigg-Flesner, W.H. van Boom, J. Watson, F. Zoll

Winner of the 2016–2018 KG Idman Prize. This monograph seeks the optimal way to promote compatibility between systems of proprietary security rights in Europe, focusing on security rights over tangible movables and receivables. Based on comparative research, it proposes how best to tackle cross-border problems impeding trade and finance, notably uncertainty of enforceability and unexpected loss of security rights. It offers an extensive analysis of the academic literature of more recent years that has appeared in English, German, the Scandinavian languages and Finnish. The author organises the concrete means of promoting compatibility into a centralised substantive approach, a centralised conflicts-approach, a local conflicts-approach and a local substantive approach. The centralised approaches develop EU law, and the local approaches Member State laws. The substantive approaches unify or harmonise substantive law, while the conflicts approaches rely on private international law. The author proposes determining the optimal way to promote compatibility by objective-based division of labour between the four approaches. The objectives developed for that purpose are derived from the economic functions of security rights, the conditions for legal evolution and a transnational conception of justice. This book is an important contribution to the future of secured transactions law in Europe and more widely. It will be of interest to academics, policymakers and legal practitioners involved in this field.

This seminal book develops a new perspective on the debate concerning the Europeanisation of private law. The theory is both realistic, building on existing experience, and normative as it focuses on the future. It outlines 'good' Europeanisation in which legal sources can be used across borders; hence the free movement of legal ideas. At its core, is the analysis of the legal consequences of growing societal uncertainty and increasing use of micro-politics, leading to a situation where the law develops through small narratives rather than according to a coherent master plan. The inevitable rule of law concerns around such a development, have to be addressed by transparent legal reasoning. The author masterfully illustrates how this can be achieved in decision-making across Europe, drawing on arguments which are both substantive and authoritative in nature. He shows how all legal actors, including decision-makers and scholars, are morally responsible for the choices made. This is a fascinating intervention in the field of European private law by one of its leading authorities.

European private law has hitherto tended to be conceptualised firmly around ideas of unity and harmony. Yet the discourse within other areas of European law, notably constitutional law scholarship, visibly adopts pluralist perspectives. This book seeks to bridge the gap between 'public' and 'private' law by looking at European private law from various pluralist positions and by investigating old and new ways in which to understand legal pluralism in general. It fills a gap in the wide literature on legal pluralism, as the first book entirely dedicated to offering an insight into legal pluralism from the vantage point of the private law domain. The book addresses critically issues such as what pluralism really means in private law and what conceptions of pluralism it embodies, including discussion about the outer boundaries of any of the pluralist understandings. Contributions address comparative, critical, historical, theoretical and normative aspects. The book provides an opportunity to engage innovatively with problematic conceptual issues which inform the work of European private law scholars, including the debate on the Common Frame of Reference Poject of the European Commision.