The circular economy is one in which biological and industrial materials are kept in circulation via recycling, reuse, refurbishment, composting, etc. This means that producers have to change the design of their products and make them modular to enable repair, refurbishment, upcycling, or simply extraction of valuable materials they contain to give them new [...]
Introduction Contracts are the central building blocks for many developments in the transnational sphere such as the global value chains (GVCs) where they become vehicles for distribution, participation, and equality, a role more far-reaching than a mere buyer-supplier relationship (Eller, 1408, 1410). In this regard, the European Union’s (EU) recent Corporate Sustainability Due [...]
As of this week, the TPL blog will start publishing a series of blog posts around the theme “Social Justice, Private Law and Europe(?) 2024-2044: Keeping the Hope Alive”, which will be at the centre of a workshop at the University of Amsterdam on 24-25 October 2024. In 2004, a group of legal scholars [...]
Why is the space for critical legal engagements within EU law so narrow, almost non-existant? Critical legal engagements openly question the underpinnings of EU legal thinking showing how its inner logics reproduce various forms of inequalities and power asymmetries. They don’t primarily seek to reform the law. Their main focus is laying bare the [...]
This blog was featured earlier on the N-EXTLAW project website Since first bursting on the scene in Italy in the late 1980s, the notion of the 'social enterprise' has spread to nearly every corner of the globe. In recent years, many jurisdictions have accommodated and stimulated this expansion by introducing legal frameworks for [...]
In his blog post summarizing the contents of the new Dutch Responsible Business Conduct strategy, Jurrien van Rees writes on the difficulties of turning due diligence into binding legal provisions:Due diligence should be appropriate to a company’s circumstances and can be adapted to deal with the limitations of working with business relationships. On the [...]
Responsible business conduct (RBC) is here to stay. There is a clear trend towards more binding RBC measures. Some countries have introduced thematic or sectoral due diligence legislation for specific RBC themes, such as forced labour and exploitation (including child labour) or for specific sectors (e.g. timber and minerals). Examples include the UK Modern [...]
When we talk about transformative private law, an important question we should ask is: who are the drivers of transformation – private parties, legal scholars, legislatures, or the EU? This blog post revolves around the transformative role of the judiciary in European private law, which is also the topic of a recently published [...]