In the context of the current debate on the desirability and process of forming European private law (EPL), this book considers one fundamental question addressing its descriptive and normative dimension: does and should EPL pursue regulatory objectives beyond market integration? The editors argue that because national categories are of little help in grasping the characteristics of a multi-level regulatory system, it is necessary to link three perspectives: private law, regulation and conflict of laws. This book explores this interaction in four distinct fields: product liability, environmental protection, public utilities and e-commerce. The results show that EPL is highly regulatory and that the implications of this change have not been adequately considered by institutions and by scholars. The Regulatory Function of European Private Law will be of great interest to academics of law, as well as to private and public lawyers and European policymakers.

The debate concerning the desirability and modes of harmonisation of European Private Law (EPL) has, until now, been mainly concerned with substantive rules. The link between rules and institutions suggests that governance of both the process of harmonisation and its outcome is necessary. This book covers various perspectives on the challenge of designing governance for EPL: the implications of a multi-level system in terms of competences, the interplay between market integration and regulation, the legitimacy of private law making, the importance of self-regulation, the usefulness of conflict of law rules, the role of intergovernmental institutions, and the aftermath of enlargement. In addressing these, the book's achievements are to successfully link two areas of scholarship that have so far remained separate, EPL and new modes of governance, and to address institutional reforms. The contributions offer different proposals to improve governance: the creation of a European Law institute, the improvement of judicial cooperation among national courts, the use of committees for implementation of EPL. Suggesting practical institutional reforms that can improve the process of Europeanisation of private law, this book will be of great interest to scholars of law, politics, political science, sociology and economics. It will also appeal to policymakers, and members of both European institutions and national institutions dealing with European matters.

This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally. Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of ‘shadow’ ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.

Contemporary debates about the changing nature of law engage theories of legal pluralism, political economy, social systems, international relations (or regime theory), global constitutionalism, and public international law. Such debates reveal a variety of emerging responses to distributional issues which arise beyond the Western welfare state and new conceptions of private transnational authority. However, private international law tends to stand aloof, claiming process-based neutrality or the apolitical nature of private law technique and refusing to recognize frontiers beyond than those of the nation-state. As a result, the discipline is paradoxically ill-equipped to deal with the most significant cross-border legal difficulties - from immigration to private financial regulation - which might have been expected to fall within its remit. Contributing little to the governance of transnational non-state power, it is largely complicit in its unhampered expansion. This is all the more a paradox given that the new thinking from other fields which seek to fill the void - theories of legal pluralism, peer networks, transnational substantive rules, privatized dispute resolution, and regime collision - have long been part of the daily fare of the conflict of laws. The crucial issue now is whether private international law can, or indeed should, survive as a discipline. This volume lays the foundations for a critical approach to private international law in the global era. While the governance of global issues such as health, climate, and finance clearly implicates the law, and particularly international law, its private law dimension is generally invisible. This book develops the idea that the liberal divide between public and private international law has enabled the unregulated expansion of transnational private power in these various fields. It explores the potential of private international law to reassert a significant governance function in respect of new forms of authority beyond the state. To do so, it must shed a number of assumptions entrenched in the culture of the nation-state, but this will permit the discipline to expand its potential to confront major issues in global governance.