Summer reading

One final question on the holiday checklist could be what to read during the holidays. If you are looking for some recent literature in the field of European consumer and contract law you may be interested in a new working paper by Daniela Caruso on the EU's social justice agenda ('Qu'ils mangent des contrats: Rethinking justice in EU contract law'). The abstract reads as follows:

'The concern for justice in the context of EU contract law was central to a scholarly initiative that led, in 2004, to the publication of a Social Justice Manifesto. The Manifesto had the explicit goal of steering the Commission’s harmonization agenda away from purely neoliberal goals and towards a socially conscious law of private exchange. Contract law would be designed at the EU level so as to become (or remain, depending on the baseline of each member state) palatable to weaker parties. Today, in the many parts of Europe devastated by rising poverty, dire unemployment rates, and collapsing social safety nets, the Manifesto needs to be revised. When the very access to the market place is foreclosed by indigence and marginalization, the promise of contracts that would be sweet toward the vulnerable has the flavour of Marie Antoinette’s brioche. This essay revisits the situational premises of the Manifesto, acknowledges its accomplishments, identifies its limits, and outlines possibilities for its renewal, both within its original framework and beyond.'

And if you like to keep up with what inspires members of the European Parliament, their book choices can be found here (from this list, I would especially recommend Verhofstadt's suggestion).

The effects of contracts beyond frontiers

Should consumers in Europe care about deplorable labour conditions under which clothing and other products they bought in the EU were manufactured somewhere else in the world? In the PhD thesis that she defended at the University of Amsterdam today, Lyn Tjon Soei Len makes a case for the invalidity under rules of contract law in Europe of economic transactions for goods made in sweatshops. She takes inspiration from the capabilities approach developed by Martha Nussbaum to argue that a society aiming to be minimally just should not support market activities that have adverse effects on the central capabilities of others elsewhere. A summary of the main lines of her research can be found in a previous publication on 'European Contract Law and the Capabilities Approach: On Distributive Responsibility for Contract Law'.

Public policy, good morals and social justice in European private law

On 26 and 27 October, the Groningen Centre for Law and Governance (GCL) organises a conference on the theme of 'Public policy, good morals and social justice in European private law':

'The focus of the session on Friday will be social-justice-inspired interpretations and applications of legal concepts of public policy and good morals as limitations to the validity of contracts and other acts of private autonomy (e.g. testaments). For what concerns contract law, the EU Commission, at least for the time being, does not seem to be willing to include a norm over immoral contracts or contracts contrary to public policy in its proposed Regulation on a Common European Sales Law (CESL). In the CESL preparatory works, a norm over illegality/immorality was proposed by scholars but this was not included in the Commission draft. Does this mean that there will be no European harmonisation of interpretations and applications of private law concepts of public policy and good morals altogether? Will this playing field for socio-economic justice in contract law remain the domain of national law? Or could perhaps some sort of European harmonisation take place through horizontal governance, especially horizontal judicial governance? A spontaneous, step-by-step convergence could be fostered by increasing judicial cooperation, especially if public policy and immorality norms are interpreted and applied in the light of the common European fundamental rights.

The Saturday session will be a round table on the comparison of the interpretation and application of public policy rules in private law, private international law and primary EU law in the light of EU fundamental rights and principles of social justice.'

More information regarding the programme will follow shortly on the conference website.

Conference visitors interested in questions of European private law might want to combine this event with (a part of) the Maastricht conference on 'EU law and the private sphere' that was announced on this blog earlier.