Category Archives: European Private Law
‘European AI FOMO: The European Commission Sacrifices the Digital Acquis at the Altar of AI Hype’
The last 12 months have seen an extraordinary shift in the European Commission’s approach to digital regulation. Faced with intense geopolitical uncertainty and concerns about EU competitiveness and security, we are seeing a shift away from the espoused ‘Brussels Effect’, with the EU placing itself as a global rule setter and emphasising fundamental rights at […]
Zbigniew Okoń, ‘Memorization of Copyrighted Works by AI Models Under EU Law’
ABSTRACT This article examines the copyright implications of memorization in AI language models under EU law, prompted by the landmark judgment of the Munich Regional Court in GEMA v OpenAI (LG München I, November 2025). The court held that the ‘memorization’ of copyrighted works in AI model weights constitutes reproduction under Article 2 of Directive […]
Akkermans and Ruitenbeek-Bart, ‘Optimizing the Societal Value of Tort Law by Meeting Justice Needs of All Stakeholders: Towards Restorative Tort Law’
ABSTRACT With their traditional focus on financial compensation, tort law systems worldwide struggle with the adverse effects the claims resolution process can have on victims of personal injury. It has therefore been argued that tort law systems should be more emotionally intelligent and more mindful of the non-financial needs of victims. In this debate, the […]
Nana Uznadze, ‘Patient’s Informed Consent and the Physician’s Civil Liability Within the Scope of Standard Treatment and Clinical Trials’
ABSTRACT Informed consent constitutes a fundamental element of modern medical relationships, embodying the patient’s autonomy and representing a universally recognized ethical principle. The present paper examines the civil law foundations of informed consent, the essential elements required for its validity, the scope of liability arising from breaches of the standard of disclosure, and special case […]
Duncan Kennedy, ‘Continental and American Critical Legal Studies: A Close Reading of an Article by Giovanni Marini’
ABSTRACT This article, intended as a contribution to a tribute issue of the Revista critica del diritto privato, offers a detailed reading of an early article by Giovanni Marini. Marini provides a richly historicized account of the similar and different trajectories of Continental European and American critical legal studies as they stood in the early […]
Karel Brychta, ‘Between transparency and protection of privacy: the impact of CJEU jurisprudence on the regulation of beneficial ownership register’
ABSTRACT This article examines the profound impact of the landmark judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in WM and Sovim SA v Luxembourg Business Registers on the regulation and enforcement of Beneficial Ownership Registers in the Czech Republic. The judgment, by invalidating the provision for unrestricted public access, fundamentally shifted […]
‘Product Liability Reform’: Webinar (European Law Institute UK Hub), 19 January 2026
The Law Commission has embarked on a review of the UK’s legislation on liability for defective products. This review is very timely, because the current legislation dates back to the mid-1980s and was enacted as Part 1 of the Consumer Protection Act 1987, based on the EU’s Product Liability Directive adopted in 1985. Since then, […]
Liubomir Nikiforov, ‘Closing the EU Collective Redress Gap: GDPR, RAD and the AI Act for Algorithmic Harms and Digital Fairness’
ABSTRACT Collective actions are gaining traction in the EU, yet the main instruments governing data, consumers and AI remain structurally misaligned with how algorithmic systems generate harms. This paper identifies an ‘EU collective redress gap’ for harms to algorithmic ‘groups of persons’. It uses doctrinal comparison of the GDPR, the Representative Actions Directive (RAD) and […]
Gabriel Lentner, ‘Generative AI and copyright in the EU and the USA: a view from international investment law’
ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence has disrupted traditional copyright frameworks by enabling large-scale ingestion of protected works for model training, sparking litigation and regulatory responses in the USA and the EU. While existing debates focus on domestic law doctrines such as fair use and text-and-data-mining exceptions, this article explores an underexamined dimension: the potential role of […]
Uroš Ćemalović, ‘Letting sleeping wasps lie: general-purpose AI models and copyright protection under the European Union AI Act’
ABSTRACT This article addresses two principal research objectives: first, to examine how and to what extent the provisions of the EU AI Act (EUAIA) dedicated to general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) models (GPAIm) govern the intersection of copyright and AI, through the scrutiny of major legal challenges raised by AI manipulations of copyrighted material, and, second, […]