The Making of European Private Law: Changes and Challenges

The book, co-authored by nine European private law scholars from different EU Member States and universities, is located at the intersection of academic research and teaching, being based on a Roundtable Series hosted within two linked courses offered, respectively, in the first and second year of the "Comparative, European and International Legal Studies Bachelor Programme" of the Faculty of Law (University of Trento). The main objective pursued in the Roundtable Series, and now in this book, has been to provide students and scholars with an opportunity to discuss, from a comparative law perspective, current and future directions in European private law. Special attention has been given to major phenomena, such as the digital revolution, the health global crisis, climate change and sustainability. Their impact on the existing private law architecture within the European Union and on its constitutional foundations, including the protection of fundamental rights, is at the core of the authors' analysis. In fact, these revolutions and crises have led to major changes in private law taxonomies and concepts at the EU and national level, and they have posed new challenges for the protection of fundamental rights, while boosting innovation and economic development. The Authors have examined some of the major issues in current European private law, questioning whether and to what extent new paradigms are needed to reconcile innovation, economic growth and fundamental rights. Recent EU initiatives in the field of digitalisation of markets, goods, services, transactions, are the object of study of these analyses, covering some of the main challenges posed in the field of property, contract and tort law. Moreover, the extent to which European private law is embedding fundamental rights into its paradigms has been also examined in areas in which EU legal action has been limited, such as housing.