The EU in Transnational Private Regulation

In times of worrying nationalism, enquiries into the future of the EU (and EU law) often result in arguments about the fragility of the EU to maintain a global leadership role. At the same time, however, increasing attention is being paid to the reach of EU rules, policies and regulatory standards beyond the EU marketplace. Yet, a core set of legal questions remain unanswered: Why is the role of the EU in the wider world gaining significant scholarly attention? What are the various forms of transnational legal ordering and how is the EU involved in them? Where do legitimacy and normativity come from in transnational legal ordering and why is there a shift in the source of authority? And, most importantly, what are the explanatory and normative effects of that shift? 

The Role of the EU in Transnational Legal Ordering. Standards, Contracts and Codes (Edward Elgar, 2020) provides a critical account of the wider role of the EU in an increasingly bewildering geopolitical scene, where the transnational and globalised political economy coexists with the current attempted return to the nation-State. This talk offers an overview of transnational legal ordering while considering its central regulatory challenge: to balance the dilemma of global governance, that is, how to integrate a political discourse, generally local, into a globalised economy. The talk focuses on the contribution of transnational private regulation to the process of regulatory export and it critically examines how the EU uses the capacity of private rules for regulatory diffusion. Relying on examples from different sectors, this event explores how private standards, contracts and codes can be used for achieving public aims where public law struggles to overcome territorial and legitimacy restrictions. All this work will be published as part of a volume, co-edited with Prof. Hans-W. Micklitz (EUI and University of Helsinki).

Speaker: Marta Cantero Gamito, Visiting Scholar, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School.

Sponsors: RCC; Jean Monnet ad personam Chair in European Union Law and Government.