Suchergebnisse

"This book analyses the founding years of consumer law and consumer policy in Europe. It combines two dimensions: the making of national consumer law and the making of European consumer law, and how both are intertwined. The chapters on Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom serve to explain the economic and the political background which led to different legal and policy approaches in the then old Member States from the 1960s onwards. The chapter on Poland adds a different layer, the one of a former socialist country with its own consumer law and how joining the EU affected consumer law at the national level. The making of European consumer law started in the 1970s rather cautiously, but gradually the European Commission took an ever stronger position in promoting not only European consumer law but also in supporting the building of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), the umbrella organisation of the national consumer bodies. The book unites the early protagonists who were involved in the making of consumer law in Europe: Guido Alpa, Ludwig Krämer, Ewa Letowska, Hans-W Micklitz, Klaus Tonner, Iain Ramsay, and Thomas Wilhelmsson, supported by the younger generation Aneta Wiewiórowska Domagalska, Mateusz Grochowski, and Koen Docter, who reconstructs the history of BEUC. Niklas Olsen and Thomas Roethe analyse the construction of this policy field from a historical and sociological perspective. This book offers a unique opportunity to understand a legal and political field, that of consumer law and policy, which plays a fundamental role in our contemporary societies."

Published in April 2017 ; The person, contract, tort, property and remedies form the ' pillars ' 1 of each and every private law system, whatever its origin might be, continental civil law or common law, and however it might appear, traditional private law or regulatory private law. 2 These pillars are subject to a deep transformation, that should be termed ' constitutional ' and that is captured in Duncan Kennedy's distinction between the three globalisations of law and their impact on legal thought. 3 Th e focus in this chapter is placed on European law and on the European Union (EU). EU law and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) are the drivers behind the transformation. This focus is justified because the EU is not a state, because the EU has no European constitution and no European Civil Code, and because the CJEU is neither a constitutional court nor a supreme court. In other words, the EU is a very particular and unique entity containing a little bit of everything that makes for a state and a sovereign legal order. Th us, I claim that the ' constitutional ' transformation of the pillars of private law through the EU and the CJEU differs in form and in substance from seemingly comparable processes in at least some of the Member States. Personally, I take as plausible the notion of the experimental character of the EU as a new state formation. Th is perspective views the EU legal (dis)order as a new format for a legal order, with a court that, owing to its particular position in the multi-level structure of the EU, enjoys a degree of freedom and discretion that allows the Court to break boundaries that national courts (whether their position is constitutional or otherwise) tend to defend. However, such an understanding implies equally that my findings are tentative and premature. ; The research leading to these results has received funding from ERPL-European Regulatory Private Law - the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. [269722] ; Based on a lecture given by the author at the SECOLA Conference in Oxford 2015.