My fellow authors of this conference handbook have zoomed in excellently on a number of topics relevant to the application of the ‘Brussels Regime’. My contribution offers a more bird's eye view on some of the grands courants of 50 years of European private international law (‘PIL’). Inevitably some of my comments may overlap with, hopefully confirm and equally hopefully contradict some of the comments made by my peers.

A SEA CHANGE. FROM UPHOLSTERED FURNITURE TO SHARIA DIVORCE

My institute co-organised the conference in March 2018, which led to current conference handbook. At the end of what was a stimulating and from my point of view also simply a fun day, my co-organisers handed me a bundle of past issues of the journal in which private international law papers had been published. Let me start my contribution by listing the papers that were published in the various issues handed to me. (These were not meant as a complete, exhaustive overview. I suspect the pile would have been too high.)

Marc Huysmans, supervised by prof. Koen Lenaerts (at the time the chair of private international law at the faculty) in 1989 wrote on insolvency in PIL. Th is paper included a comparative review of substantive insolvency in a select number of EU countries, followed by insolvency in Belgian European PIL. Th e latter focused on what was then the European Commission draft for a European Insolvency Convention.

In the same 1988–89 volume, Wouter Wils comparatively reviewed surrogacy between the US and Belgium, with a few hints at the difficulties private international law might raise in the discussion (the angle of the paper was mostly comparative family law). In the same issue, Geert Morris published the first part of a two part analysis of the 1980 Rome Convention on applicable law in contractual relations.

Hilde Jacobs in 1990–91 discussed the substantive conditions and the ‘formae habilitantes’ (the formalities required in the event of the sale of immovable property owned by minors), and Pascale Alerts and Margaretha Wilkenhuysen analysed related issues of guardianship and the sale of real estate belonging to foreign minors.