The idea is to show how and by what means the European Community is attempting to realise its overall policy to establish and accomplish the Internal Market for services, and more particularly how this policy which is meant to open up markets affects the contractual relations between the...

Unfair contract terms legislation is more than forty years old. Member States started regulating unfair contract terms from the 1970s onwards with a growing intensity. In 1993 the European Community adopted, after a lengthy discussion, Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair contract terms in consumer...

Il titolo "La mano visibile del diritto privato europeo in materia normativa" è un'espressione che dovrebbe chiarire quella che io identifico come la più grande lacuna esistente non soltanto nel discorso politico ma anche nella dottrina e nella teoria del diritto privato europeo, alla quale mi...

I am interested in the relationship between constitutional and private law. The two Grand Projects, the European Constitution and the European Civil Code, serve as a catalyst to develop my argument. I will first look at the link between the two Grand Projects by placing emphasis on parameters...

Since its creation, European Union (hereinafter: ‘the EU’) has experienced various enlargements. In 1973, Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined the EU. Greece became a Member in 1981 and was followed by Spain and Portugal in 1986. Austria, Finland and Sweden accessed the EU in 1995....

The paper is intended to develop the idea that the growing number of rules on universal services allows for the introduction of a debate about whether these rules contain the nucleus of a new social European private law. This is all the more important as the European Community will change the...

My hypothesis, which I try to present in this paper can be broken down into three different affirmations: The ECJ is developing, on the basis of the acquis communautaire, a European Social Framework, not a fully-fledged European Social Model. The ECJ’s Social Model is based on access justice...

The so-called commitment decision procedure, introduced into European competition law with Art. 9 of Regulation 1/2003, was meant to provide the Commission with the possibility to dispose of competition law cases by way of a kind of formal settlement, roughly analogous to the US consent decree....

In the US and in the EU, the antitrust rules on single-firm conduct are currently under review. Antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are reconsidering the tests to be applied in order to distinguish between lawful competition on the merits and exclusionary conduct. In the...

The complex interface between intellectual property law and competition law is currently under review both in the US and the EU. One field of contention is the unilateral exercise of intellectual property rights. This paper presents the different approaches recently taken by different US courts,...