Category Archives: Transformative Private Law
‘Consumer responsibility to remedy structural injustice: European consumer law’s capitalistic strategy’
Capitalist global processes of production and consumption are unjust. Social movements have been claiming this for decades. Production for private consumption requires an extensive use of natural and finite resources, which we are depleting. Many goods we consume in the European Union are primarily produced outside of the Member States in a manner few would […]
‘Doing Justice to Justice in EU Data Law’
Data-driven technology has become a mainstay in our societies. Feeding AI systems and the IoT, large-scale datasets have the potential to radically reshape our understanding of things and basic social practices. It should thus come as no surprise that regulating data has become a central concern of regulation across the world. The European Union’s (‘EU’) […]
‘Social injustices between inclusive and transformative private law’
Two decades on, much of the scenario against which the Manifesto was written has changed. The substantive problems it highlighted, however, have not diminished – if anything, they have intensified. The tension between socially oriented and market-driven law remains. So too does the difficulty of thinking about social justice in a post-national context, as a […]
‘Re-Coding Capital: Can a New EU Code of Private Law make Global Finance more Socially Just?’
A few years ago, Katharina Pistor published a book that presented a powerful illustration of the profound political, economic and social consequences that have resulted from a depoliticised and market-centric approach to private law. In The Code of Capital: How Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Pistor shone a spotlight on the role of lawyers in […]
‘Insuring global social justice: After success with legal claims, transnational remedial institutions are needed in a global value chain economy’
As a child in the 1980s, the clothes I wore were manufactured in the country where I lived, Finland. As an adult in the 2020s, when I buy clothes to my own children, they are ‘designed’ in Finland but manufactured in places such as Bangladesh, China and Vietnam. What happened, and what does this entail […]
‘The multifaceted aspects of the “new consent”’
Today, consent seems an important occurrence of our daily life. Traditionally, consent was the staple of classical contract law but consent is nowadays relevant not only for making contracts, but also in sexual relationships, in surrogate motherhood relationship, or in the use of our image. The new world, the digital world, is lives of: regulation […]
‘Consumer Law, Social and Ecological Justice: Charting the Crossroads’
In 2004, a group of scholars signed a collective work with the evocative title ‘Social Justice in European Contract Law: A Manifesto’. Starting from the idea that private contract law had the potential to shape the future of the European Union, the document aimed to achieve two main objectives: 1. The construction of a European […]
‘Reconfiguring contract law through sustainability’
Though not the centrepiece, sustainability was already on the radar of the Manifesto for Social Justice in European Contract Law in 2004: ‘It is important to align the general principles of social justice that govern the market order with standards designed to protect public goods such as a healthy environment’. Twenty years later, as humanity […]
‘The other “class” question’
The original Manifesto refers to ‘procedures’ and ‘enforcement’ only once each. Yet, civil procedure is essential to any analysis of private law. In Europe, civil procedure and enforcement laws are advancing at a fast pace, influenced both by the European Union and national legislatures. In the past two decades, Europe has witnessed a noticeable increase […]
‘How the “Legal Capacity” of Persons with Disabilities May Serve as a Tool for Social Justice in Europe?’
Self-determination, employment, housing, and access to credit are essential aspects of social justice insofar as they are necessary to satisfy citizens’ fundamental needs and ensure a range of basic entitlements (Caruso 2013). All these central traits of the human condition are closely connected with (and dependent on) one of the basic and traditional concepts of […]