Using an interdisciplinary approach involving economics, sociology, and law, this book examines the purposes, efficiency, and efficacy of legal regulation of contracts and suggests how legal regulation fails and how it might be improved. The conclusions suggest that the law plays an insignificant role in the construction of markets, and that it could provide better assistance by using indeterminate regulation that permits the recontextualization of legal reasoning.

Hugh Collins examines whether the harmonisation of private law in the European Union would be a desirable development.

To encourage cross-border transactions in the Single Market of the European Community, the Commission has proposed general framework legislation to set general standards that forbid unfair marketing practices towards consumers, thereby increasing consumer confidence when deciding whether or not to shop abroad in the Community, either in person or through modern methods of electronic purchasing through the Internet. The essays in this volume critically examine the proposed Directive that prohibits unfair commercial practices, and in particular they consider the potential legal and economic...

Includes papers presented at a "lively workshop held in All Souls College and Wadham College, Oxford in March 2016."--Acknowledgements.