Prof. Franz Werro – European Private Law: Quo Vadis?

European private law has been in the making for a number of decades. The main goal has been to serve the needs of the Single Market. Despite a variety of eorts to make national private laws converge, little unity has emerged. Nevertheless, the Single Market has survived and even grown. This talk oers a critical assessment of the EU’s achievements in the development of European private law. It will examine how the ECJ has interpreted the EU Directives in key areas of contract and tort, and ask to what extent the case law of the European court has harmonized the law in these elds.

The presentation will also reect on possible alternatives to the Directives, and question the meaning and need of codifying attempts such as the one proposed in the Law of Sales in 2011 (CESL). More generally, the talk will reect on legal and cultural diversity in Europe. In particular, it will ask how language determines the way we think, and whether one law can be expressed in more than language. As private law is an expression of culture, it may be that European private is impossible to achieve, as long as cultures remain dierent from one country to the other.