EU sports law has conventionally been understood to involve the assembly of the several decisions of the Court of Justice and the Commission that apply free movement and competition law to the practices of governing bodies. The influence of these decisions has generated change in some aspects of sporting governance, in the EU, and beyond. But the EU does not set the terms according to which sport shall be organised. This article makes the case for the EU moving beyond its orthodox approach to sports law, which is rooted in the accidents of litigation, and also choosing to embrace a role as a regulator. This will diminish the autonomy that governing bodies in sport have long prized, but the article asserts the need for this in order to address the conflict of interest to which governing bodies fall prey when they perform regulatory functions while also making commercially significant choices. It is, however, unclear whether the political will needed to propel EU sports law beyond the application of internal market law to embrace also the establishment of mandatory ex ante standards can be assembled.

Katharina Pistor’s recent work has revealed a deep justice deficit in private law, raising fundamental questions about how it could be reduced. While Pistor favours piecemeal bottom-up solutions to instances of injustice, Martijn Hesselink proposes a more radical top-down strategy – the adoption of a progressive European code of private law. This article explores the top-down and bottom-up pathways to justice in private law, focussing on the role of interpersonal justice as justice between substantively free and equal persons in European private law. It shows that although concerns about a balance of the competing interests of private parties pervade many of its areas, they do not take central stage in European private law. The substantive private autonomy embodied in national private law systems, the regulated private autonomy enshrined in EU secondary private law and the unregulated private autonomy with an interstate element underpinning EU free movement law sit uneasily together. It is argued that in order to enhance the role of interpersonal justice in the internal market and develop a more coherent European private law, the current bottom-up pathway thereto could be complemented by a more top-down roadmap towards the EU principles of private law justice.