This book includes the conference proceedings of a conference in September 2019 in Leuven. The Institute for Property Law of the University of Leuven had the opportunity to welcome numerous authoritative legal scholars to debate on the impact of sustainability challenges on the crossroads between contract and property. While environmental issues, and more broadly sustainability, are often conceived as a matter of public law, if a matter of law at all, in recent years, also private law aims to join in. More fundamentally, environmental law could challenge the main division in private law, the division between contract and property. Fundamental rules of traditional private law, with strong historical roots, such as the privity of contracts, the closed system of property rights, the praedial rule with regard to servitudes, etc. are under pressure. The contributions of this book therefore are situated at the point of encounter of at least three fields of law: environment, contract and property. Very often, a fourth field of law joins this encounter: the constitutional protection of ownership plays a major role in the described challenges. The contributions in this book are on the one hand, careful analyses of national laws, and on the other hand, more general views on the interplay between property law and sustainability.

Vincent Sagaert provides in his contribution ‘Property Law, Contract Law and Environmental Law: shaking hands with the (historical) enemy’ a general historical and theoretical glance on the development of the fields of law at stake, with property law as the hinge of the analysis. Environmental law and property law are born enemies, but have developed towards a gradual conversation during the last decades. Within private law, contract law and property law were living more apart than together for historical reasons. The contribution demonstrates how this has changed over the decades, and how environmental law even strengthens this development.

Bram Akkermans discusses ‘Sustainable Obligations in (Dutch) Property Law’ and frames the current developments in a broader framework of property theory, especially the Human Flourishing Theory, which could provide a basis for further going change. He illustrates this with a discussion of the Dutch qualitative obligation (kwalitatieve verbintenis).