European Contract Law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the extent to which the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union will influence the development of contract and commercial law at a European level. The essays in this volume examine how the Court of Justice has already used the Charter to steer the law governing consumer transactions, financial contracts, contracts of employment, self-employment, tenancies, and other contractual arrangements. They then proceed to assess the likely future impact of the Charter on EU contract law, using a variety of legal, historical, and theoretical perspectives. These original assessments by distinguished scholars range from claims that the Charter will only have a mild indirect influence to arguments that the Charter provides the necessary legal foundations for EU contract law and for a market society within a multi-level system of governance. Questions are raised about the scope of application of the Charter; its indirect but significant effect on national legal systems, especially in improving the effectiveness of EU law; and whether the rights and principles of the Charter may sometimes have direct effect on contracts by leading a court to disapply national law.

Hugh Collins became the Vinerian Professor of English Law in 2013. He obtained his BA (1974) and BCL (1975) from Pembroke College, Oxford, and an LLM (1986) from Harvard Law School. He was a Fellow in law at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1976 to 1990, when he became the Professor of English Law at the London School of Economics, where he was also head of the department of law for two terms of office. He has been a Visiting Professor at New York University Law School and Boston University Law School. He has served as a member of the editorial committee of The Modern Law Review since 1991, and as a founder and editor of the European Review of Contract Law. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006.