European Regulatory Private Law: From Conflicts to Platforms

Abstract

The essay provides a reflection on European Regulatory Private Law (ERPL), as both a perspective on and a model of European legal integration. First, it outlines some of the problems familiar to legal and other scholars that give rise to ERPL as a perspective on legal integration, including the pluralisation of legal sources and institutions and the resulting legal fragmentation. This in turn produces the need to manage conflicts or collisions in law-application to concrete legal problems either by making choices from existing alternatives or by innovating. Secondly, it provides possible impulses that inform ERPL as a research agenda and a way of making headway on those familiar problems. The final—and more exploratory—step, is to envisage the shape that ERPL might take given those problems and impulses as a model of normative interaction in the EU context. One guiding intuition is that it might be limiting to speak of the resulting normative framework as one for merely managing conflicts between normative orders. An alternative conception might be that of integration, so that ERPL could be thought of as a platform (or platforms) aiming to integrate to the greatest extent possible the perspectives of the various relevant law producers and enforcers in the pursuit of various dimensions of the public interest. For that purpose, the essay will sketch out some possible platform models drawing on existing examples.