Pluralism and European Private Law

...essential reading for those interested in the subject of the Europeanisation of private law. -- Pierre Bouvier * Agence Europe's Daily Bulletin No 10853 *
In the prologue to the collection of essays, Niglia explains the book’s aim to propose “reflection on a path towards awareness and action”. This approach calls to mind Mangabeira Unger’s agenda for “legal analysis as institutional imagination”, which promotes a method of mapping developments in law, combined with a process of criticism aimed at redefining societal ideals and imagining institutional structures for their fulfilment. In a similar vein, Niglia seeks to raise awareness of the plural condition of European private law, understood as the coexistence of territorial (domestic) private law orders with post-territorial, functional orders (European and global). Collections of essays usually run a certain risk of conveying disunity rather than a harmonized picture of the theme to which they relate; different perspectives and styles of authors might confuse a reader as to what the overall message of the book is. A work on pluralism may even be more vulnerable to such defects than books on more clearly or uniformly defined themes. By adding a prologue and epilogue, as well as insightful introductory overviews to the three parts of the work, however, Niglia shapes the context within which the individual chapters may be read and understood. He emphasizes the plurality of different conceptions of European private law pluralism, lists the different visions on conflict resolution (or settlement, or accommodation) provided by various authors, indicates how the language of pluralism may serve to facilitate a discourse among disciplines, and stresses the important normative questions posed by legal pluralism in the field of European private law. Although this grammar of pluralism is undoubtedly influenced by the editor’s views on the general theme, it serves well to provide a common language within which to redefine and discuss developments in European private law and engage with the variety of views held by different authors in the field. -- Chantal Mak * Common Market Law Review, Volume 51, Issue 2 *