In this book the expansion of human right legislation in national and international law is examined from theoretical and comparative perspectives.

Privacy today is much debated as an individual's right against real or feared intrusions by the state, as exemplified by proposed identity cards and surveillance measures in the United Kingdom. In contrast, invasions of privacy by private individuals or bodies tend to arouse less concern. This book attempts to fill the gap by looking at the horizontal application of human rights after Douglas v Hello, Campbell v MGN and Caroline von Hannover v Germany. It provides a conceptual and theoretical framework and also considers specific particularly sensitive areas of law relating to privacy protection, such as intellectual property, employment and media law. It provides comparative perspectives by relating Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which serves as a focal point, to UK, Dutch, German and European Communities law. Several common threads are revealed running across jurisdictions and different areas of law and aspects of privacy. The most notable is the definition of privacy in terms of the autonomy of the individual, a notion associated with the liberal state in the classic sense but now acquiring more content as a human right also linked to ideas of social justice.

For every transnational lawyer, it is vital to know the differences between national secured transactions laws. Since the applicable law is determined by the place where the collateral is situated, it may change when movables are brought from one state to another. Introductory essays from comparative lawyers set the scene. The book then presents a survey of the law relating to secured transactions in the member states of the European Union. Following the Common Core approach, the national reports are centred around fifteen hypothetical cases dealing with the most important issues of secured transactions law, such as the creation of security rights in different business situations, the relationship between debtor and secured creditor, the nature of the creditor's rights and their enforcement as against third parties. each case is followed by a comparative summary. A general report evaluates the possibilities of European harmonisation in the field of secured transactions law.

In recent years the impact of human rights and fundamental rights on private law has risen in prominence and led to a whole series of detailed investigations. 'Constitutionalization of private law' is the flag under which most of the research on the increasing impact of national constitutional rights on national private legal orders is sailing. In the absence of a European Constitution, the constitutionalization of European private law suggests a process: constitutionalization instead of constituent power, demos, and the magic constitutional moment. The Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights constitute the two pillars on which the transformation of European private law rests. This volume clearly demonstrates the change that has taken place, at the national and at the European level. Private law is no longer immune to the intrusion of fundamental and human rights. Whilst member states and the EU are driving the process by adopting ever more concrete and more comprehensive lists of human and fundamental rights, at the national, the European, and international level with overlapping contents, the true and key players in this development are the national and European courts. Contributions to this volume give this process a face and a direction, which is highlighted in the introduction by Hans-W. Micklitz.

This collection contributes to a fundamentally important set of debates about the nature of private law. The essays consider whether private law should be seen as having goals and, if so, whether those goals are particular to private as opposed to public law. They consider the legitimacy of the pursuit of community welfare goals in private law and the place of instrumentalist thinking in private law scholarship. They explore the relationship between the pursuit of policy goals and the other influences that shape private law, such as the formal values of certainty, consistency and coherence and the need to do justice to the parties to particular disputes. The collection analyses the role that particular policy goals do and should play in particular private law doctrines, and contributes to debate about the relationship between community welfare goals and considerations of interpersonal morality arising from the interactions between individuals. The contributors are drawn from across the common law world and offer a diverse range of perspectives on the controversies under consideration.

Describes why nearly all federal law is intended only for government officers, and employees and how to prove it.

The notion of a civil wrong is one of the most fundamental concepts in private law. Without the concept of a civil wrong, areas of private law like tort law or property law would not be able to fulfil their aims. This volume brings together a wide variety of scholars who have written original papers exploring the centrally important notion of a civil wrong.

This book examines the greening of civil codes from a comparative perspective. It takes into account the increasing requirements of supranational rules, which favour measures to reduce global warming and its negative environmental impacts; it discusses the necessity to expand distributive justice given the current ecological emergency; and it reflects on which private law legal tools potentially may be employed to defend nature’s interests. The work fills a gap in the growing literature on developing rights of nature and ecosystem in transnational law. While the focus is on the environmental issues pertaining to the new civil codes and new projects of civil codes, the book promotes interdisciplinary research applicable to a range of environmental and natural resources–focused courses across the social sciences, especially those related to comparative law systems, legal anthropology, legal traditions in the world, political science and international relations.

Does private law punish? This collection answers this complex but compelling question. Lawyers from across the spectrum of the law (contract, tort, restitution) explore exactly how it punishes wrong doing. These leading voices ask whether that punishment is effective and what its societal role might be. Taking the discussion out of the technical and into a broader realms of a wider purpose, it is both compelling and thought-provoking.