Accounts of the nature of legal authority typically focus on the authority of officially sanctioned rules issued by legally recognised bodies - legislatures, courts and regulators - that fit comfortably within traditional state-centred concepts of law. Such accounts neglect the more complex processes involved in acquiring legal authority.
Throughout the history of modern legal systems texts have come to acquire authority for legal officials without being issued by a legislature or a court. From Justinian's Institutes and Blackstone's Commentaries to modern examples such as the American Law Institute's Restatements and the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts academic codifications have come to be seen as legally authoritative, and their norms applied as such in courts and other contexts.
How have such texts acquired legal authority? Does their authority undermine the orthodox accounts of the nature of legal systems? Drawing on examples from Roman law to the present day, this book offers the first comparative analysis of non-legislative codifications. It offers a provocative contribution to the debates surrounding the harmonisation of European private law, and the growth of international law.

This Festschrift, dedicated to Frits W. Vaandrager on the occasion of his 60th birthday, contains papers written by many of his closest collaborators. Frits has been a Professor of Informatics for Technical Applications at Radboud University Nijmegen since 1995, where his research focuses on formal methods, concurrency theory, verification, model checking, and automata learning. The volume contains contributions of colleagues, Ph.D. students, and researchers with whom Frits has collaborated and inspired, reflecting a wide spectrum of scientific interests, and demonstrating successful work at the highest levels of both theory and practice.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, FORMATS 2020, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2020. The 16 full papers and 2 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers focus on topics such as foundations and semantics, methods and tools, techniques, algorithms, data structures, and software tools for analyzing timed systems and resolving temporal constraints. Due to the Corona pandemic this conference was held as a virtual event.

This detailed description and comparative analysis of the development of tort law in Europe over the last 150 years is based on national reports that are structured by a basic questionnaire. The national reports are complemented with a comparative analysis of the parallel, though often diverging, developments in the different legal systems. It can clearly be seen that different groups in the legal systems, such as judges and scholars, often had diverging views on tort law that were translated into more specific doctrinal and evaluative statements. Accompanied by a general expansion of liability due to changing perceptions of the risks of accidents, the former Roman law of delict and the medieval law of torts have been transformed into modern rules of extra-contractual liability that are deeply entrenched into the social security and insurance systems.

This English translation makes available to anglophone readers a modern classic of German tort theory. It argues that modern German tort law is faced with doctrinal tensions based on problematic theoretical assumptions which stem from historical conceptions of tortious liability, inappropriate to modern times. From a theoretical perspective, it argues against the prevalent doctrinal view in Germany that conceives of tortious liability as split between two tracks - a fault-based track and a strict liability track - each with different normative foundations. Instead, Jansen asserts that there is no rigid distinction between the normative foundations of each form of liability. Rather, both fault liability and strict liability in German law, and indeed other European systems, are best considered as resting upon the unifying theoretical structure of outcome responsibility. The book thus places responsibility rather than wrongdoing at the centre of the normative foundations of tort law. Historically, the book traces in detail how conceptions of tort liability have changed from Roman law to contemporary legal doctrine. It shows how particular historical understandings of the normative basis of tort law have led to continuing normative tensions in contemporary doctrine. Finally, the book examines how a reconstruction of modern German - and, indeed, European - law as based upon outcome responsibility should affect its doctrinal structure. This book makes contributions to the study of the theory, history, and doctrinal structure of tort law. While drawing on and explaining German tort law, its comparative, theoretical, and historical analysis will be of interest to scholars in all legal systems.

The book provides rule-by-rule commentaries on European contract law (general contract law, consumer contract law, the law of sale and related services), dealing with its modern manifestations as well as its historical and comparative foundations. After the collapse of the European Commission's plans to codify European contract law it is timely to reflect on what has been achieved over the past three to four decades, and for an assessment of the current situation. In particular, the production of a bewildering number of reference texts has contributed to a complex picture of European contract laws rather than a European contract law. The present book adopts a broad perspective and an integrative approach. All relevant reference texts (from the CISG to the Draft Common European Sales Law) are critically examined and compared with each other. As far as the acquis commun (ie the traditional private law as laid down in the national codifications) is concerned, the Principles of European Contract Law have been chosen as a point of departure. The rules contained in that document have, however, been complemented with some chapters, sections, and individual provisions drawn from other sources, primarily in order to account for the quickly growing acquis communautaire in the field of consumer contract law. In addition, the book ties the discussion concerning the reference texts back to the pertinent historical and comparative background; and it thus investigates whether, and to what extent, these texts can be taken to be genuinely European in nature, ie to constitute a manifestation of a common core of European contract law. Where this is not the case, the question is asked whether, and for what reasons, they should be seen as points of departure for the further development of European contract law.