Abstract

The Manifesto on Social Justice in European Contract Law proposes to derive European private law principles, including principles of fairness in contract law, from the acquis communautaire. This task encounters the difficulty of the predominant regulatory character of the acquis, which resists reformulation in the traditional general and abstract principles of private law. This problem cannot be ignored or dismissed, but it can be accommodated once it is appreciated that European private law will itself comprise a modern hybrid of law and regulation in its logic and modes of governance.