The power of reasons in European private law

Abstract

Justifying Contract in Europe (hereafter: the book) explores the power of political reasons in European private law.1 It does so by engaging critically with the justifications offered by various political theories for their ideal European contract law. Thus, the book neither aims nor claims to remain neutral, as some critics have suggested.2 Instead, its stance is consistently critical (which is not the same as sceptical).3 The epistemic dimension here is the expectation that we can learn something about European contract law that other approaches leave unaddressed, that is, about European contract law as it should be. Crucially, however, the book is equally committed to the idea that learning about normative questions is a collective endeavor. I am, therefore, delighted, that the editors of the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy decided to bring together six critical discussions of the book in a special issue. And I am deeply grateful to the authors for their insightful and challenging engagement with core aspects of my book. I would like to express my particular gratitude to two of them, Mirthe Jiwa and Lyn Tjon Soei Len, for acting, in addition, as guest editors of this special issue. Because the six contributions are invariably rich and dense, it is impossible to fully address all the important questions they raise. Therefore, in this response I will restrict myself to focusing, in each case, on the two or three points I consider their main and most challenging criticisms. The responses to two contributions take somewhat more space than the others, because they invited me to engage with the work of specific philosophers.