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,...

The EU is currently re-conceptualizing the goals of competition law and their place within the EC Treaty. Whereas the Draft Reform Treaty is emphasizing the weight of public policy goals vis-à-vis the goal of undistorted competition, the EU Commission has made an effort to remove...

This paper explores the EU solidarity place inside the labour relations. The first part scrutinizes the context in which in the EU solidarity can be developed: Solidarity between workers has national roots, no place at the Eu Institutional level, is limited inside the European Social dialogue....

The title The Visible Hand of European Regulatory Private Law should make clear what I identify to be the major gap not only in political discourse but also in legal doctrine and in legal theory concerning European private law and where I hope to bring additional expertise which is so far...

This essay deals with product safety and liability, looking in particular at the interaction between regulation, contract and civil liability. Risk definition, assessment and management in product safety has changed in the last 20 years, and a well recognised role is played by private actors...

The European Work Council is a transnational actor which represents the workers in European firms. The paper identifies the difficulties and obstacles which limits the powers of EWC (legitimacy in question, content of constitutive agreement, link with national bodies, transnational coordination...

In the consumer society, as it stands today in Western-type democracies, consumers have a far larger choice of products and services originating from all over the world than they did decades ago. Risks associated with products and services have also increased, as have mass problems and mass...

This paper aims at assessing the right of employees to refuse to have their contracts of employment transferred within the framework of the transfer of undertakings Directive. A transnational as well as a theoretical analysis is proposed. Beyond the comparison of the implementation of this...

In this paper, I address the issue of contractual networks in the European context. The term contractual networks encompasses both multilateral contracts and networks of linked bilateral contracts. Contractual networks are hybrid forms of organisation located between markets and hierarchies....

In the European Union, a set of legal instruments was developed to enhance social partners’ actions. Here, we consider whether these instruments encourage, at Community level, efficient trade union actions in response to the strategies deployed by multinational firms at international level. In...