European Private Law

Unlike other handbooks on European private law, which focus mainly on describing the effects of the sources of EU law in the legal systems of the Member States, this work sets out to lay the foundations for understanding the process of the formation of a European private law.

It illustrates its significance by starting from its original conception in the 1930s, with the historians’ studies on the modern idea of Europe and the role that law could play in the preservation of peace, cooperation between peoples and the construction of a common market.

The European legal identity arises from the way the law is understood, how it is interpreted and applied, but also on the cultural basis of the jurist’s training.

Then the book examines the general principles of law and the main institutes of civil law : persons and fundamental rights, contracts, civil liability, in the coordination of the different sources of law and in the realisation of a multilevel protection of rights.

The legal analysis is always accompanied by historical and economic perspectives, following the example of Paolo Grossi, whose ‘Message of Law to Europe’ is the reader’s guide.

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Guido Alpa, lawyer since 1974, is Professor Emeritus of Civil Law, La Sapienza University of Rome and he is President Emeritus of the Italian Bar Association. He is the author of several monographs on civil liability, consumer law and European private law.

Mads Andenas holds a Chair in the Faculty of Law, the University of Oslo (from 2008). He served as the ChairRapporteur of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of which he became a member in 2009 (his second and not renewable term expired in 2015). In 2019 he was appointed an honorary Queen’s Counsel. From the Lord Chancellor’s recommendation: Professor Mads Andenas is considered a stellar academic and has been recommended for his work in the fields of comparative and international law, in familiarising academic and practising lawyers and the judiciary in this jurisdiction with other systems of law and by encouraging exchanges of views and approaches between common and civil lawyers.

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