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    The general transformations of Private Law since Léon Duguit. Autonomy, responsibility and sovereignty in European Private Law

    Comparato, Guido and Condon, R. (2019) The general transformations of Private Law since Léon Duguit. Autonomy, responsibility and sovereignty in European Private Law. In: de Almeida, L. and Cantero Gammito, M. and Djurovic, M. and Purnhagen, K.P. (eds.) The Transformation of Economic Law: Essays in Honour of Hans-W. Micklitz. London, UK: Hart Publishing. ISBN 9781509932580.

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    Abstract

    Abstract: This contribution compares the transformations taking place in European private law in recent years to the transformations first described one century ago in French legal scholarship confronted with the interpretation of the French Code Civil in a deeply changed social context. That scholarship, epitomised by personalities like Léon Duguit, challenged the dominant legal formalism, with its emphasis on the subjective right, insisting instead that private law and the state perform social functions. Duguit’s legal functionalism remains a useful lens through which to examine contemporary transformations of private law and the state in an EU context. In fact, contemporary law is characterised by new economic, technological, and societal processes which produce an increased level of complexity linked to new ‘transformations’ of private law. This contribution thus highlights the characteristics of those transformations separated by a century of legal evolution attempting to trace them in the specific area of European private law. A considerable difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is that those processes of transformation that Duguit noted now take place beyond a territorial defined state in the context of market-building in a supranational arena. This leads to a greater, and unimagined, blurring if not bypassing of the public-private divide. Duguit’s ‘legal theory without sovereignty’ well describes these developments but is now under pressure from renewed idealisms.

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    Item Type: Book Section
    Additional Information: This book is written in honour of Hans-W. Micklitz for his jubilee 70th birthday and the closure of his twelve-year term as the Chair for Economic Law at the European University Institute (EUI). Hans-W. Micklitz has gained international recognition for dedicating his extensive and fruitful career to diverse areas of law: European Economic Law, European Private Law, National and European Consumer Law, Legal Theory, theories of Private Law and Social Justice. This book is a product of the collaborative endeavors of its contributors, who all have a special connection with Hans W. Micklitz as his doctoral supervisees or research assistants. The collection of twenty chapters is to be read as the influence of Hans's dialogues in the early stage of the academic career of thirty-one young legal scholars. The volume is divided into three sections devoted to subjects that have received Hans's attention while at the EUI: EU Consumer Law (part I); European Private Law and Access Justice (part II); the CJEU between the individual citizen and the Member States (part III).
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Law School
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 26 Jul 2019 06:55
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:52
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/28273

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