Since the start of the new millennium, many contemporary jurisdictions have been revisiting the fundamental principles of their civil procedures. Even the core areas of the civil process are not left untouched, including the way in which evidence is introduced, collected and presented in court. One generator of the reforms in the field of evidence-taking in recent decades has been slow and inefficient litigation. Both in Europe and globally, reaching a balance between the demands of factual accuracy and the need to adjudicate disputes in a swift, cost-effective and efficient way is still one of the key challenges. The second reason that many countries are reforming their law of evidence is related to cultural and technological changes in modern societies. As the balance between, on the one side, traditional human rights such as the right to privacy and due process is shifting towards, on the other side, the modern need for security, efficiency and quick access to justice, the perception of what is admissible or not in the context of evidence-taking is changing as well. In the same sense, the fast pace of modern life commands different practices of fact-finding, accompanied by new methods of selection of evidence that are appropriate for this purpose. Last but not least, the overwhelming penetration of new technologies into all spheres of public and private life has the capacity to dramatically change the methods of the collection and presentation of evidence.Exploring these issues, the editors of this book invited the contributors to reflect on how these trends affect the situation in their countries and to present their views on further developments, both nationally and in comparison with the developments in other countries and regions. A further goal was to inquire whether, in spite of national differences that are still dominant, the approaches to civil evidence are converging, and whether reforms affecting fact-finding have a chance of leading to some forms of harmonization.This publication has been produced with the financial support of the 2007-2013 Civil Justice Programme of the European Union. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of authors and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Commission.

The French projet d'ordonnance, which reformed contract law, the general regime of obligations and the proof of obligations appeared in February 2015. One year later, in February 2016, the final version of the ordonnance was published. The ordonnance thoroughly reforms French contract law and the law of obligations and will enter into force in October 2016.This book results from the Contract Law Workshop of the 20th Ius Commune Conference held 26-27 November 2015. The theme of this Workshop was: 'The French Contract Law Reform: a Source of Inspiration?' Since the conference in November 2015, all authors have incorporated comments on the final version of the ordonnance. Whereas Van Loock briefly sketches the antecedents and the outcome of the reform, the other authors each tackle specific topics of the reform that surprised and/or excited the legal community. Pannebakker tackles the precontractual phase and assesses the attractiveness of the reform for international commercial transactions. Peeraer gives a critical overview of the doctrine of nullity in the ordonnance. Leone explores the potential impact of the 'significant imbalance' test in the new ordonnance on employment contracts. In their contributions, Lutzi and Oosterhuis discuss the much-debated provision that introduces the theory of imprévision. The contributions by Jansen and Verkempinck are both focused on remedies: the newly introduced price reduction remedy and damages. Storme criticises the new rules on set-off in the ordonnance, and Mahé addresses the question why the final version of the ordonnance omitted the issue of interpersonal effects of fundamental rights on contractual freedom.

A book series devoted to the common foundations of the European legal systems, the Ius Commune Europaeum series includes comparative legal studies as well as studies on the effect of treaties within national legal systems. All areas of the law are covered. The books are published in various European languages under the auspices of METRO, the Institute for Transnational Legal Research at Maastricht University. This book contains an empirical study of the converging effects of the harmonisation policies used by the European lawmaker in consumer sales law. It aims to fill a gap in existing literature, by looking at what European consumer sales law harmonisation has achieved and by developing a methodology to measure the convergence it has led to. The work encompasses both a substantive comparison as well as a numerical approach.While in the former, five directives and their subsequent transposition in the national laws of Member States are analysed, the latter focuses on the creation of the Convergence Index as a measurement tool for the effects of the harmonisation process. The book will be useful to both academics as well as policy makers, as it aims to trigger further debate regarding benchmarking in European consumer law. Such debate will play a role in further academic research aimed at determining whether harmonisation does indeed strengthen the internal market. Catalina Goanta has conducted her doctoral research at the Maastricht European Private Law Institute (Maastricht University) under the supervision of Jan Smits and Caroline Cauffman, funded by the HiiL-UM Chair on the Internationalisation of Law.

A book series devoted to the common foundations of the European legal systems. The Ius Commune Europaeum series includes comparative legal studies as well as studies on the effect of treaties within national legal systems. All areas of the law are covered. The books are published in various European languages under the auspices of METRO, the Institute for Transnational Legal Research at Maastricht University.This book examines the regulation of the inter-provincial establishment of companies in China and the EU regulation of the cross-border establishment of companies from the perspective of comparative law and economics. Part I of this book discusses the rules governing inter-provincial establishment in China and examines their implementation, with a focus on revealing the barriers to this activity. This part also analyses the evolution of the EU internal market and shows how the EU regulates the cross-border establishment of companies.Subsequently, Part II presents an economic analysis of the regulation of the crossborder establishment of companies in a multi-level jurisdiction. In Part III, the regulation of the inter-provincial establishment of companies in China is reviewed in the light of the economic literature. With the aim of examining whether China can learn something from the EU's experience with market integration, Part III also analyses the differences between the regulation of the inter-provincial establishment of companies in China and the EU regulation of the cross-border establishment of companies.This book offers a thorough analysis of the regulation of business establishment in China and, more generally, the law and economics literature on business licensing. Therefore, it is of interest for law and economics scholarship, companies doing business in China and policy makers responsible for regulating business establishment.

This book analyses the theory of efficient breach in English sales law, European Union contract law and Chinese contract law. It analyses the framework of the efficient breach theory and reconsiders the implications of this theory. According to the traditional efficient breach theory, the remedy of expectation damages is able to motivate efficient breach, which brings the breaching party economic surplus without making the non-breaching party worse off. The essential problems are how to motivate contract parties to make rational decisions and how to solve cases where performance of a contract turns out to be less efficient after its conclusion. The second part of the book further extends the efficient breach theory to the study of contract law systems by analysing how exactly those laws react to breach and what solutions are adopted by them.The comparison of these three systems is more than a mere description of the differences and similarities in the content. More importantly, this comparative research also analyses whether or not the differences between these systems will influence the level of efficiency produced by each legal system by taking account of the different traditions and the concepts of contracts involved in each legal system. Researchers in contract law will also be interested in this approach, particularly for re-thinking the question of whether one legal system is definitely better or worse than the other two.

In various European countries such as France, Italy, and the Netherlands, lawmakers have adopted legislation in order to deal with the consequences of the economic crisis. These laws contain provisions aimed at speeding up administrative decision making and judicial proceedings which have an impact on various provisions of general administrative law. Alongside the aim of facing the economic crisis, these measures aim to make administrative law more up-to-date and ensure it meets the needs of contemporary society.However, acceleration measures concerning decision-making and judicial proceedings may clash with the need to preserve the quality of these proceedings. On the one hand, swift procedures can be considered to be one aspect of high-quality decision making. On the other hand, other aspects of quality such as public participation and the thorough consideration of all relevant aspects and interests, may be at risk when the speed of decision-making is the only focus of reforms.Quality and Speed in Administrative Decision-Making: Tension or Balance? presents six national perspectives on these issues, together with a comparative overview comparing and contrasting national approaches with regards to finding a balance between the pace of proceedings and the quality of administrative and judicial decisions.The book will be of interest to academics of European and comparative administrative law, as well as policy-makers at the national and European level.

According to the European Commission, differences in contract law and the additional transaction costs and complexity they generate in cross-border transactions dissuade a considerable number of traders, in particular SMEs, from expanding into markets of other Member States. These differences are also said to limit competition in the internal market. Furthermore, they underlie the European Commission's draft Regulation for a Common European Sales Law (CESL). The 2012 Ius Commune workshop on Contract Law was dedicated to the position of SMEs in European Contract law and focused on their contractual relations with other SMEs (SME2SME), consumers (SME2C and C2SME) and larger companies (B2SME and SME2B). Is there a need for a kind of "consumer law for professionals"? This book contains the most interesting and challenging contributions to this workshop.

This is a book on comparative law and legal change. With a focus on corporate law and the law of personal property, it reviews the current state of the comparative debate on the evolution of law and seeks to establish new perspectives to explain the mechanism of legal reception. It finds the comparative discussions centred on the appropriateness of describing the movement of law from one country to another in terms of 'legal transplants' perplexing and lacking in a convincing inquiry into the reception process. In an attempt to fill that gap, this study contends that certain recent contributions on culture contact and culture change provide an interesting explanation for the circulation of juridical models across national boundaries. More precisely, this study argues that the notion of hybridity, as originated in postcolonial theory, offers a formidable conceptual means to examine the intricacies of legal evolution, to refine and to give content to the observation of the reception of law. The analysis in comparative jurisprudence put forward in this book does not rest exclusively on theoretical grounds. The complexities of the themes involved are explored and tested by focusing on a case study. This is the legal mechanism by which shares in companies are transferred in England under the direct and indirect holding systems.