The global financial and economic crisis which started in 2008 has had devastating effects around the globe. It has caused a rethinking in different areas of law, and has posed new challenges to regulators and private actors alike. One of the emerging issues is the apparent eclipse of boundaries between different legal disciplines: financial and corporate lawyers have to learn how public law instruments can complement their traditional governance tools; conversely, public lawyers have had to come to understand the specificities of the financial markets they intend to regulate. While...

From various perspectives, this book's contributions explore the 'images' of the consumer in EU law. The images of the consumer form the foundation for various EU policies, more or less directly oriented towards the goal of consumer protection. The purpose of the book is to establish what visions of the consumer there are in different contexts of EU law, whether they are consistent, and whether EU legal engagement with consumer-related considerations is sincere, or merely instrumental to the achievement of other goals. Chapters discuss how consumers should be protected in EU contract,...

The entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 caused the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights to be granted binding effect. This raised a host of intriguing questions: ** Would this transform the EU's commitment to fundamental rights? ** Should it transform that commitment? ** How, if at all, can competing rights and principles be balanced? (The interaction of the social and the economic spheres offers a particular challenge). ** How deeply does the EU conception of fundamental rights reach into and bind national law and practice? ** How deeply does it affect private parties? ** How much...

Wealth can be transferred on death in a number of different ways, most commonly by will. Yet a person can also use a variety of other means to benefit someone on death. Examples include donationes mortis causa, joint tenancies, trusts, life-insurance contracts and nominations in pension and retirement plans. In the US, these modes of transfer are grouped under the category of 'will-substitutes' and are generally treated as testamentary dispositions.

Much has been written about the effect of the use of will-substitutes in the US, but little is generally known about...

The book focuses on the institutional mutation of constitutionalism following the major economic crisis in the Eurozone and globally. The main axis is that a new economic constitutionalism has arisen, which trespasses the conventional conceptual foundations and needs to be addressed with novel institutional vehicles. The author proposes an original and searching analysis of the significant constitutional evolutions which have taken place in member states in response to the global financial crisis. The book combines a sophisticated theoretical model of a new form of economic constitutionalism...

The French Civil Code, which governs the law of obligations in France, has remained unchanged since 1804 and has served as the model for civil codes across the world. In 2016, the French Government enacted legislation repealing much of this law. This work looks at the effect of this action and the new provisions for French contract law. Drawing on the expertise of comparative lawyers working on French law and the law of other civil codes, it explores the lively debates between French and other scholars on the merits (or demerits) of the reform. It will make these seismic and fundamental...

This book presents, analyzes, and evaluates the Principles of Latin American Contract Law (PLACL), a recent set of provisions aiming at the harmonization of contract law at a regional level. As such, the PLACL are the most recent exponent of the many proposals for transnational sets of 'principles of contract law' that were drafted or published over the past 20 years, either at the global or the regional level. These include the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts, the Principles of European Contract Law, the (European) Draft Common Frame of Reference, and the Principles...