Digital Technologies and the Law of Obligations critically examines the emergence of new digital technologies and the challenges they pose to the traditional law of obligations, and discusses the extent to which existing contract and tort law rules and doctrines are equipped to meet these new challenges. This book covers various contract and tort law issues raised by emerging technologies - including distributed ledger technology, blockchain-based smart contracts, and artificial intelligence - as well as by the evolution of the internet into a participative web fuelled by user-generated content, and by the rise of the modern-day collaborative economy facilitated by digital technologies. Chapters address these topics from the perspective of both the common law and the civil law tradition. While mostly focused on the current state of affairs and recent debates and initiatives within the European Union regulatory framework, contributors also discuss the central themes from the perspective of the national law of obligations, examining the adaptability of existing legal doctrines to contemporary challenges, addressing the occasional legislative attempts to deal with the private law aspects of these challenges, and pointing to issues where legislative interventions would be most welcomed. Case studies are drawn from the United States, Singapore, and other parts of the common law world. Digital Technologies and the Law of Obligations will be of interest to legal scholars and researchers in the fields of contract law, tort law, and digital law, as well as to legal practitioners and members of law reform bodies.

EU Private Law and the CISG examines selected EU directives in the field of private law and their effects on the national private law systems of several EU Member States and discusses certain specific concepts of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in light of the CISG's recent fortieth anniversary. The most prominent influence of EU law on national private law systems is in the area of the law of obligations, thus the book focuses on several EU private law directives that cover the issues belonging to contract and tort law, as interpreted in the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU. EU private law concepts need to be interpreted autonomously and uniformly rather than through the lens of national private law systems. The same is true for the CISG which has not only been one of the most successful instruments of the international trade law unification but had also influenced both the EU private law and domestic laws. In Part I, focused on the EU private law and its effects for national laws, chapters examine the recent Digital Content and Services Directive and its likely impact on the contract law of the UK and Ireland, the role aggressive commercial practices play in EU banking and credit legislation, the applicability of the EU private international law rules to collective redress, the unfair contract terms regime of the Late Payment Directive and its transposition into Croatian law, the implementation of the Commercial Agency Directive in Denmark, Estonia and Germany, and disgorgement of profits as remedy provided in the Trade Secrets Directive. In Part II, dealing with selected CISG issues, chapters discuss the autonomous interpretation of CISG's concept of sale by auction and its notion of intellectual property, as well as the CISG's principle of freedom of form and the possibility for reservations with the effect of its exclusion. The book will be of interest to legal scholars in the field of EU private law and international trade law, as well as to the students, practitioners, members of law reform bodies, and civil servants in Europe, and beyond.

The Law of Obligations in Central and Southeast Europe examines the new codifications, reforms, and other recent developments in Central and Southeast Europe which have significantly modernized the law of obligations in the last two decades, focusing particularly on the legal systems of Poland, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Turkey. With chapters authored by prominent academics and promising young legal scholars, this book discusses the results of the modernizations and describes the legislative reforms of the law of obligations that are underway or are discussed and advocated for in the countries of Central and Southeast Europe. Divergences of the new civil codes and other legislative acts from earlier legal solutions are identified and the rationale behind these departures is analysed, as well as the introduction of the new legal institutes in the law of obligations in these parts of the world. The Introduction provides a concise country-by-country overview of the recodification, modernization, and reform of the law of obligations in Central and Southeast Europe. In Part I, chapters discuss the process of recodification in the Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, with focus on the main novelties in their contract and tort law. The chapters in Part II then discuss several, more specific legal institutes of the law of obligations, and other recent developments and contemporary challenges to the law of obligations in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Turkey. This book is of interest to legal scholars in the field of private law, as well as to students, practitioners, members of law reform bodies, and civil servants in Central and Southeast Europe, and beyond.