Category Archives: European Private Law
Lagioia, Jabłonowska, Liepina and Drazewski, ‘AI in Search of Unfairness in Consumer Contracts: The Terms of Service Landscape’
ABSTRACT This article explores the potential of artificial intelligence for identifying cases where digital vendors fail to comply with legal obligations, an endeavour that can generate insights about business practices. While heated regulatory debates about online platforms and AI are currently ongoing, we can look to existing horizontal norms, especially concerning the fairness of standard […]
Watanabe and Malumian, ‘Trust in Civil Law Countries: A World Guide to Civil Law Jurisdictions with Trust Regimes and an Analysis of Key Definitions and Concepts’
ABSTRACT Common Law jurists often assume that trusts do not exist within the Civil Law, or that they are fundamentally different from their Common Law counterpart. However, following more than a century of incorporating trust regimes into Civil Law (with nearly thirty countries having enacted such legislation) it follows that a distinct Civil Law trust […]
Lucas Weschenfelder, ‘The Contra Legem Fable: A Reexamination of the History of Legal Theory and Private Law in the Formative Moments of the German Free Law School’
ABSTRACT This article revisits the formative context of the Germanic Free Law Movement, one of the most influential theoretical developments in twentieth-century German and Austrian legal thought. The study aims to reconstruct, in a synthetic manner, the emergence of the so-called contra legem fable, a narrative that has persistently shaped interpretations of the Movement. The […]
Güner and Atamer, ‘Reception and development of the Swiss Civil Code in Türkiye: where do we stand in Turkish Family Law after 100 years?’
ABSTRACT This article explores the century-long path of the reception and adaptation of the Swiss Civil Code in Türkiye through the lens of family law, tracing its evolution from the late Ottoman modernization efforts to the legislative overhaul of the 2002 Turkish Civil Code. Adopted by Türkiye in 1926, the Swiss model provided a modern, […]
Enrico Baffi, ‘To Provide for Damages Is Not to Authorize: Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Tort Law in Italy’
ABSTRACT This paper examines whether Italian tort law can properly be described through the liability rule model developed by Calabresi and Melamed. It argues that the conventional law-and-economics view of tort liability as a system that permits harmful conduct subject to the payment of damages does not accurately describe the structure of Italian law. The […]
Santos, Gray, Bielova and Ahuja, ‘Usable and lawful: can consent be both?’
ABSTRACT Under the GDPR, a valid consent must satisfy a number of requirements to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive (ePD). The article evaluates the design of consent banners using a common and popular usability inspection method in human-computer interaction scholarship known as heuristic evaluation, which enables the researcher […]
‘What has long arms and lives in Switzerland? The cross-border injunction club gains a new member’
One and a half years after the CJEU’s BSH v Electrolux decision (C-339/22, Katpost here), patent litigation in Europe looks very different. To recall the fundamental finding of this decision, the CJEU confirmed that a court that has jurisdiction under Article 4(1) of the Brussels Regulation (recast) regarding the infringement of a foreign patent does […]
Natia Nakashidze, ‘Inheritance Law in Georgia: Acceptance of Inheritance, Heirs’ Rights, Escheat Property, Judicial Practice, and the 2026 Reform’
ABSTRACT This article examines inheritance law in Georgia, with particular emphasis on the acceptance of inheritance, heirs’ rights, intestate and testamentary succession, estate property, inheritance registration, escheat property, and the legislative reform effective from 1 July 2026. It analyses the relevant provisions of the Civil Code of Georgia, including Article 1343, together with the jurisprudence […]
Jasper Verstappen, ‘Towards an Ontology of Property Law and Digital Assets: A Comparative Analysis of German, French and English Law’
ABSTRACT Digital assets challenge property law’s ontology of things. National property laws diverge as to the types of digital assets recognised as property as well as the degree of recognition afforded. Their lack of a physical instantiation, coupled with the fact that digital assets are neither contingent upon recognition by the legal system nor upon […]
Florian Stautemas Baele, ‘A Breath of Determinism: Free Will and Tort Law in Fin de Siècle Legal Scholarship’
ABSTRACT This article situates Franco-Belgian tort law scholarship at the fin de siècle within the broader debate on free will, moral responsibility, and determinism. While positivism’s impact on penal law is well-documented, its influence on private law has been notably overlooked. It is argued that the emergence of risk theory was not merely a pragmatic […]