The Influence of EU Law on National Private Law

Samenvatting

The impact of European Union Law on private law is considerable and continues to increase. In some areas of private law that impact is nearly as old as EU law itself, but in more recent years it has begun to spread to other parts of private law and to its heartland, the law of obligations (including contracts, torts and unjust enrichment) and property law. The influence is divided over legislative texts (EU Treaties, regulations and national legislative acts implementing directives) and important case law of the European Court of Justice interpreting those texts. This two-volume collection aims at informing the different actors (parties, attorneys, judges, scholars) about the influence of current EU law on national private law. Its main purpose is to enhance the knowledge of legal professionals ... taking a specific interest in general private law by discussing the EU-law aspects that have come to be associated with it. This analysis of the EU-law dimension of current national private law will enable these actors to obtain a clear picture of the rules that govern their legal relationships and to derive arguments from the law as it currently stands. The collection brings together over fifty contributions in two volumes. The contributions in the first volume (general part), written in English, pay attention to general issues of EU law relevant for private law and to the way in which the central areas of private law are influenced by EU law. The volume covers in Section A such topics as the different horizontal effects of EU law, the fundamental freedoms, the general principles of EU law, the fundamental rights, harmonious interpretation and ex officio application. In Section B the EU influence on property law, contract law, tort law, unjust enrichment and competition law is discussed. The second volume (special part), mainly written in Dutch, presents in Section A an overview of the directives dealing with topics of general private law with a view to their implementation in national law. In Section B it discusses the relationship of EU law and private law in a number of more specific areas, such as company law, labour law, intellectual property law, procurement law, transport law, insurance law, international private law and insolvency law.