Primary EU law : European regulatory private law and national private law

Abstract

The reference point for this chapter is the influence of primary EU law on private law as well as the visible regulatory private law in all its facets. It challenges the premise that many EU lawyers and private lawyers in Europe will share, namely the intuition about the relatively limited importance of primary EU law for the Europeanization of private law. We will structure different categories of relations between EU law and private law (section II). More importantly, however, this chapter is aiming at the disclosure of specific deficiencies in the current academic discourse, which largely neglects the impact of primary EU law on private law as well as the impact of European regulatory private law (section I). EU law scholars direct their attention to the legitimacy of EU law. The debate among private law scholars mainly focuses on the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR), the feasibility of a European Civil Code along the lines of the grand codifications in Europe, the Common European Sales law (CESL), the most recent Proposal on Internet Sales and on European consumer law, as long as it remains connected to contract law. The chapter concludes with possible explanations, which may lie behind this limited attention (section III). It is only through the broadening of perspective, through looking at the interactions between European Union law and private law, that transformative effects of EU law are becoming clear.