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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This comprehensive Handbook provides a critical and analytical guide to the application of interdisciplinary research methods in EU law and explores the advancement of the EU legal landscape from an interdisciplinary research perspective. Venturing beyond doctrinal legal scholarship, it reflects on the cognitive synergies between EU law and other disciplines, and advances the debate on contemporary trends in EU law research. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

While scholarly writing has dealt with the role of law in the process of European integration, so far it has shed little light on the lawyers and communities of lawyers involved in that process. Law has been one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of the European integration process, and EU law has become a well-established academic discipline, with the emergence more recently of an impressive body of legal and political science literature on 'European law in context'. Yet this field has been dominated by an essentially judicial narrative, focused on the role of the European courts, underestimating in the process the multifaceted roles lawyers and law play in the EU polity, notably the roles they play beyond the litigation arena. This volume seeks to promote a deeper understanding of European law as a social and political phenomenon, presenting a more complete view of the European legal field by looking beyond the courts, and at the same time broadening the scholarly horizon by exploring the ways in which European law is actually made. To do this it describes the roles of the great variety of actors who stand behind legal norms and decisions, bringing together perspectives from various disciplines (law, political science, political sociology and history), to offer a global multi-disciplinary reassessment of the role of 'law' and 'lawyers' in the European integration process.