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In contemporary business relations, the possibility for one party to a contract to transfer all of its rights and obligations under the contract to a third party by way of a voluntary act is of great utility. While the possibility to do this generally exists in jurisdictions across Europe, the rules by which it must be done can differ under the relevant national laws, not to mention the fact that a specific legal regime is not articulated in most civil codes. Against this background, this paper compares the approaches taken in Italian law and the uniform rules elaborated at an international level in the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe's aggravating housing crisis lies in the blind spots of law. While central in constructing housing both as a home and as an asset, law bears the task of mediating between housing's multiple - social, economic, and cultural - dimensions. However, inner-legal fragmentation and a legal imaginary of property, the nation state, and its welfare system have depoliticized, deflected and rendered inaccessible the 'housing question'. Turning to tenancy contract law in particular, this article argues that the 'social' orientation of this early example of a 'materialised' field of contract law is not only ill-suited to reflect the recent structural shifts in the housing market brought about through financialisation. Tenancy contract law has effectively taken a conservative drift by claiming to adequately administer the bilateral landlord-tenant relation while being insensitive to macro-level developments. Tenancy contract law reindividualises tenant responsibility in the eye of hardships whose roots lie outside the contractual sphere and thereby furthers, rather than curtails, neoliberal housing policies. As a reaction, the article proposes political economy as a conceptual vantage point from which to develop a 'holistic housing law'. Such a perspective combines a concern for democratic and collective agency with careful attention to law's tacit and technical role in shaping the flow of finance and the techniques of landlords' governmentality. Part of this is a 'transformative tenancy law', to be reformulated to protect not against landlord bargaining power in the first place but against a hegemonic and expansive market rationality that structurally corrupts the social and material meaning of housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is aimed at illustrating how the traditional idea of "inalienability" of personality rights has been reshaped and transformed by the increasing commodification of corporeal and incorporeal components of identity. Three different legal regimes have recently emerged in Europe: market-inalienability with regard to body rights; limited inalienability rules with regard to personal data; modified contract law applicable to incorporeal components of identity – such as name or likeness – having commercial value. The objective of this paper is to describe each of these models and provide a contribution both to the theory of inalienability and of contract law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001, the European Commission mooted the idea that contract law should converge in Europe. The idea generated wide-ranging debate about the merits of convergence. The multi-disciplinary nature of this debate has led to important insights, but also conceptual confusion. In this paper, I rely on philosophical tools to clarify key concepts, and identify central issues. In particular, I argue that value pluralism and state sovereignty give rise to the central problem of the legitimacy of the harmonisation project. The issue of legitimacy has not been handled well in the literature. There has been an overly narrow focus on the issue of constitutional legitimacy, or the notion of 'legitimacy as consent'. I attempt to broaden the discussion by considering other accounts of legitimacy. I argue that whichever account is used, the legitimation burden is significant and it is unclear it has been surmounted. Beyond legitimacy, I consider how efficacy considerations seem to militate against convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of contract laws is said by the Commission to discourage cross-border trade and hinder the development by SMEs of a pan-European commercial policy. An optional instrument containing both facilitative general contract rules and mandatory consumer protection rules, one of the solutions proposed by the Commission, is gaining rapid support from key stakeholders. Drawing from firms' own views on the problems of legal diversity, and insights from organisational science, this article sets out the circumstances in which firms will likely consider a European optional code. Results are mixed: some firms may consider it, while others may ignore it. Much depends the firm's aspirations (i.e. SMEs cannot be assumed as-yet to have pan-European aspirations), how the firm perceives the problems of legal diversity, and how it searches for and decides upon solutions. It would appear that a European optional instrument may not be as useful or widely considered as its proponents would like to believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract: A lack of transparency in the hotel ranking system presents a serious problem for the industry. This is especially the case when it comes to providing information to the consumer and converting quality standards into binding standards. Since quality management is not merely a strategy for commercialisation, the aim of the first part of this research paper is to offer companies recommendations from a contract law perspective. This area of law reveals that a reduction in price can be very useful for facing quality failures. For this reason, the second part of this paper examines the requirements of such a remedy for non-performance and promotes the application of scales for calculating a price reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how feasible it is to achieve approximated contract law provisions in the European Union comprising Member States with considerably diverging legal attitudes towards regulating contractual relationship. Issues as to the form and content the future Common Frame of Reference (CFR) should embody are at the core of present analysis. The article aims to show that the success of contract law harmonisation in Europe largely depends on the chosen method for approximation and determination of limits for harmonisation. Discovery of commonly accepted standards (basic values) among different jurisdictions in the European Union is presented as an initial yet a necessary precondition for further contract law harmonisation procedures. Identification of common contract law values along with the advantages of harmonisation method are the basic tools for both: achieving balance between aimed uniform contract law and preservation of distinct national traditions inherent in contractual relationship. At the very outset the article outlines the controversial situation that approximation of European contract law currently faces. The following part of the article seeks to describe the relevance of common values in the course of contract law harmonisation. The expedience of various contract law approximation mechanisms is further discussed in this article. Finally, the article assesses the anticipated positive impact the proposed scenario should pose upon national contract law systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is an exercise in a neo-Austrian based economic analysis of product liability. After a short historical introduction, we take two of the basic premises of Austrian economic thought and see which system of product liability results. If costs are subjective and entrepreneurship is the essence of an efficient market process, a system of caveat emptor and vendor results. For judges to assess damages, in the way others advocate judges to do, judges would need to measure costs, something that cannot be done according to Austrian economics. The paper also answers some possible criticisms from the mainstream neoclassical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]