This handbook provides reliable information on private law in an increasingly integrated Europe. It contains a collection of specially commissioned essays, including contributions on: corporation law, trust, law of sales, competition law, products liability, personal injuries law, limitation periods, the harmonization of European private law, and more. The essays are designed not only to offer a comprehensive overview of the different topics, but also to display and provoke lively and controversial debate. The handbook addresses some issues that appear to be both growing in momentum and largely overlooked by contemporary literature, namely a) the need to examine current and possible future developments in European private law institutions and issues affecting the legal lives of private, business, and public actors; b) the opportunity to fill a gap in the comparative literature through a concise reference book, which offers quick and easy access to the most relevant legal issues; and c) the cultural debate as to what European private law is and could be, rather than what it ought to be. It follows that the handbook is not meant to simply describe substantive law, but instead to "compare" private law institutions and cultures.

Europe is a broad and multifaceted construct, variously understood as a geographical, political, legal, institutional, social, or cultural formation. It is characterized by numerous conflicts and processes of negotiation that have accompanied or sustained the development of normative orders and divergent conceptions of law, both in relation to individual states and to Europe as a whole. The same applies to the field of literature, language, and aesthetics; numerous myths and ideologies have shaped today’s understanding of Europe and still support it today. This volume examines how such processes were legally structured, and literarily addressed, criticized, and complemented. Its interdisciplinary perspective and open and dynamic, both dialogical and dialectical format intends to replicate the fragmented, sometimes conflicting, but always productive mosaic of voices, ideas, and concepts that have constituted and still constitute Europe, whether in the past, present, or future. Instead of resolving any of the complexities and contradictions that frame discussions on law, literature, and Europe, it aims to induce further engagement and confrontations with new and alternative visions of Europe.

The "Europeanization" of European private law has recently received much scrutiny and attention. Harmonizing European systems of law represents one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. In effect, it is the adaptation of national laws into a new supra-national law, a process that signifies the beginning of a new age in Europe. This volume seeks to frame the creation of a new European Common Law in the context of recent events in European integration. The work is envisioned as a guide and written in a research friendly style that includes text inserts and an extensive bibliography. The detailed analysis and research this volume accomplishes is invaluable to those scholars and lawmakers who are the next generation of European leaders.

For many observers, the European Union is mired in a deep crisis. Between sluggish growth; political turmoil following a decade of austerity politics; Brexit; and the rise of Asian influence, the EU is seen as a declining power on the world stage. Columbia Law professor Anu Bradford argues the opposite in her important new book The Brussels Effect: the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image. By promulgating regulations that shape the international business environment, elevating standards worldwide, and leading to a notable Europeanization of many important aspects of global commerce, the EU has managed to shape policy in areas such as data privacy, consumer health and safety, environmental protection, antitrust, and online hate speech. And in contrast to how superpowers wield their global influence, the Brussels Effect - a phrase first coined by Bradford in 2012- absolves the EU from playing a direct role in imposing standards, as market forces alone are often sufficient as multinational companies voluntarily extend the EU rule to govern their global operations. The Brussels Effect shows how the EU has acquired such power, why multinational companies use EU standards as global standards, and why the EU's role as the world's regulator is likely to outlive its gradual economic decline, extending the EU's influence long into the future.

All legal texts tell us stories in many ways. What stories, what narratives, can be found in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union? This book invites the reader to think of the world of EU law as a creative process. From such a perspective, the adjudicative praxis of the Court is an intellectual, cultural, literary activity, in which the reader can imagine him- or herself participating. The author develops a novel hermeneutic methodology to examine the textual performance of the Court, by combining the work of American 'Law and Literature' scholar James Boyd White with the work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. This methodology allows for an analysis of the role played by the Court in its legal reasoning and the vision of humanity it demonstrates: narratives of 'self' and 'other.' The synthesis of two case studies (on economically inactive EU citizens' access to social benefits, and on data protection and privacy) results in an open-ended and self-reflective examination of the narratives about human agency and human responsibility in the case law of the Court of Justice European Union.

This book explores the development of law in Europe from its medieval origins to the present day, charting the transformation from law rooted in the Church and local community towards a recognition of the centralised, secular authority of the state. Shows how these changes reflect the wider political, economic, and cultural developments within European history Demonstrates the diversity of traditions between European states and the possibilities and limitations in the search for common European values and goals

In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.