Category Archives: European Private Law
‘Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google’
Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews. The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other […]
Augustin Gridel, ‘Registered Shares in Private International Law – A French and European Perspective’
ABSTRACT The private international law rules governing the ownership of shares have long rested on the modalities of their transfer, which afforded considerable significance to the form they take (registered or bearer). This article seeks to demonstrate that this approach, which is of doctrinal origin, does not in reality determine the applicable law, having regard […]
Lysiane Tendil, ‘Reshaping the European Patent Judicial Architecture since Brexit and the Entry into Force of the Unified Patent Court (2020-2026): Hybridisation of Common Law and Civil Law’
ABSTRACT Between 2020 and 2026, the European patent system experienced two concurrent structural disruptions: the United Kingdom’s effective withdrawal from the European Union (31 January 2020, end of the transition period on 31 December 2020) and the entry into force, on 1 June 2023, of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) together with the European patent […]
Liubomir Nikiforov, ‘EU Collective Redress for Inferred Groups: Standing and Compensation under the GDPR, the Representative Actions Directive and the AI Act’
ABSTRACT EU laws 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 the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), complemented by case studies of TPC v Oracle/Salesforce and […]
Elena Izyumenko, ‘Trademark Law as Regulation of Expression: Why Article 10 ECHR Should Become the Internal Grammar of European Trademark Law’
ABSTRACT This chapter argues that European trademark law increasingly operates as a system of expression regulation and should therefore be reconstructed in light of Article 10 ECHR. Trademark law no longer merely protects consumers against deception: through anti-dilution protection, expansive infringement standards, and morality-based registration rules, it increasingly governs the circulation of cultural and political […]
Margarida Lima Rego, ‘Bidding Farewell to Good Family Fathers: Advancing the Role of Private Law in the Promotion of Just and Inclusive Societies’
ABSTRACT This paper examines the use of the expression bonus pater familias in the Portuguese law of obligations as a reference to the standard of care applicable to the performance of a contractual obligation. The paper acknowledges the law’s harmful effects in perpetuating discriminatory gender stereotypes. However, its main goal is to look beyond that, […]
Juan Carlos Olarra, ‘Trusts and Spanish law in 2026: institutional indifference as a method of legal non-engagement’
ABSTRACT The increasing globalisation of private wealth has established the trust as a cornerstone of cross-border estate planning. Yet Spanish law in 2026 continues to resist meaningful engagement with this legal institution. This resistance does not stem from ignorance in any literal sense. Rather than confronting trusts directly, Spanish law has developed a strategy of […]
Gommers, Leppink and Schneider, ‘Round-up of European enforcement case law 2026’
ABSTRACT In 2025, several noteworthy decisions relating to the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) were handed down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the national courts of the European Union Member States. These judgments rendered between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2025 are summarized in this contribution. As […]
Krzysztof Chmielarz, ‘Mediator in the Polish Civil trial’
ABSTRACT The article discusses the results of research on the functioning of judicial mediation in civil cases. The effectiveness of mediation is assessed on the basis of the number of concluded settlements or discontinued proceedings as a result of approval of the settlement concluded before the mediator. In the course of the research, the reasons […]
‘Specifying a Fourth Integrity: A European Constitutional Method for the Digital Fairness Act’
The European Digital Fairness Act (DFA), which the Commission will table at the end of 2026 under the portfolio of Michael McGrath, is being drafted in the grammar of consumer protection. For adults, that grammar holds. For children, it is the wrong category. A child cannot meaningfully consent to the architectural shaping of the very […]