Flux des sites DIP

On 2 December 2025, the Court of Justice gave its ruling in Apple Nederland Store (case C-34/24), on the interpretation of Article 7(2) of the Brussels I bis Regulation in cases regarding infringements of cartel law. A first comment on the judgment, by Burkhard Hess, was published on this blog the day after the judgment […]

The latest issue of RabelsZ has just been released. The table of contents is available here. All content is Open Access: CC BY 4.0. More recent articles and book reviews are available Online First.

 

ESSAYS

Anne Röthel, Debatten über das Vergleichen. Wanderungen zwischen Rechtsvergleichung und Komparatistik [Debates about Comparison. Journeys between Comparative Law and Comparative Literature], pp 615–647, https://doi.org/10.1628/rabelsZ-2025-0060

Many academic fields look to comparative methods in pursuit of insight, with scholars debating how to proceed and what they hope to learn from the comparison. This article explores what comparative law stands to gain from interdisciplinary dialog with other fields of comparative inquiry. By way of example, it evaluates the potential gain from several journeys into the field of comparative literature. At first, these journeys back and forth between disciplines reveal a number of parallels: a striking resemblance between each field’s narrative of its own becoming; both fields’ exposure to fundamental criticisms; both fields ethicizing along similar trajectories; each one’s encounter with related dilemmas. At the same time, these journeys into comparative literature reveal implicit hierarchies and orientations in comparative law. But these cursory journeys through the history of comparative literature also counsel that comparative law would do well to avoid letting its own debates over the direction of the field veer into polarization and name-calling, into a kind of struggle that is mostly unwinnable and unproductive.

 

João Costa-Neto, João Guilherme Sarmento, From Roman Marriage to Unmarried Unions.
Defining the Requirements for de facto and Registered Partnerships, pp. 648–682, https://doi.org/10.1628/rabelsZ-2025-0059

This study examines the historical and comparative evolution of family law, tracing the transition from Roman marriage to contemporary partnerships. The article explores how Roman law conceptualised marriage as a social institution based on affectio maritalis, detailing its transformation through Christian doctrine into an indissoluble sacrament and its subsequent adaptation within modern legal systems. By analysing legal frameworks in Germany, Italy, France, England, and Brazil, the inquiry highlights the varying degrees of recognition granted to unmarried unions, from informal cohabitation to registered partnerships. The comparative analysis reveals the dynamic interplay between tradition, societal norms, and legal evolution, underscoring how distinct legal systems balance autonomy and protection in family law. This work contributes to the broader discourse on the harmonisation of family law and the impact of evolving societal values on legal institutions.

 

Tom Hick, Claiming Back Anticipatory Performance after Failed Negotiations.
A Comparative Analysis of Alternatives to Precontractual Liability, pp. 683–713, https://doi.org/10.1628/rabelsZ-2025-0049

As a matter of principle, breaking-off negotiations or refusing a contract offer are lawful actions. For based on freedom of contract, each individual is free to contract, free to choose one’s counterpart and the content of the contract, and equally free not to contract. Only exceptionally can a party be held liable for breaking-off negotiations based on wrongful conduct. Hence, it appears worthwhile to look for alternative approaches to recover fruitlessly incurred costs in the context of negotiations that failed independently of any wrongful conduct. Undue payment offers precisely this possibility. Therefore, the present contribution offers an exploratory look at the chances of success of an action for undue payment to recover costs incurred in the context of failed contract negotiations in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. The paper finds that in those cases where fruitlessly incurred costs technically qualify as a payment in the respective national legal system, the prospects for the party seeking to recover these costs are surprisingly positive.

 

Derwis Dilek, Sebastian Omlor, Dominik Skauradszun, A New Private International Law for Digital Assets, pp. 714–742, https://doi.org/10.1628/rabelsZ-2025-0053

The increasing popularity of digital assets presents significant challenges for private international law, as fundamental conflict-of-laws rules concerning proprietary issues are often absent. This article outlines a possible approach to a technologically neutral and function-based conflict-of-laws framework. Taking existing instruments into account, it examines in particular the role of party autonomy through a choice-of-law rule, as well as alternative connecting factors based on structural, functional, or factual links between digital assets and legal systems. Building on this, the article proposes a conflict-of-laws framework for determining the law applicable to proprietary issues. This framework is designed to be applicable to various types of digital assets, including those based on decentralized networks. The proposed draft rule combines an express choice-of-law option with a multi-layered system of objective connecting factors and includes supplementary mechanisms for cases where the applicable law lacks substantive provisions.

 

Claudia Mayer, Keine verfahrensrechtliche Anerkennung von beurkundeten oder registrierten familienrechtlichen Rechtsgeschäften innerhalb der EU, [No Procedural Recognition of Acts Affecting Personal Status Based on Certificates Issued by Public Agencies within the EU], pp. 743–765, https://doi.org/10.1628/rabelsZ-2025-0058

In EU law, there is a discernible tendency on the part of the EU legislature to subject legal acts to procedural recognition – including as to their substance – based on certificates of recording or other kinds of documents issued by public agencies. It has therefore already been argued in the literature that a change of method has taken place whereby the conflict-of-laws as well as substantive review in the receiving state has been replaced by a recognition system. But this position must be rejected; generally, such documents issued by public agencies, from a procedural point of view, only have formal probative value. If the validity of the underlying legal act is ultimately uncertain from the point of view of the originating state and if no (procedural) position can be established based on the state’s participation, the substance of the act may and must be re-examined by the receiving state in accordance with the law designated by a conflict of laws examination there, even at the risk of creating a limping legal relationship. The ECJ’s case law on Art. 21 of the TFEU does not alter this principle. To further prevent limping legal relationships at the European level, what is needed instead is better standardization of the conflict of laws in EU secondary law.

 

BOOK REVIEWS

This issue also contains several reviews of literature in the fields of comparative private and private international law and on related topics (pp. 766–820).

The fourth and final issue of the RabelsZ (The Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law) for the year of 2025 has been published and is now available via open access and in print, featuring topics as diverse as Roman marriage and digital assets. The following titles and English abstracts of the articles have […]

[If you do use the blog for research, practice submission or database purposes, citation would be appreciated, to the blog as a whole and /or to specific blog posts. Many have suggested I should turn the blog into a paid for, subscription service however I have resisted doing so. Proper reference to how the blog is useful to its readers, will help keeping this so.]

Advocate-General Norkus’ approach in Case C-485/24 Locatrans Sarl v ES, which I reviewed here, focused on identifying a mutually agreed lex laboris and on the assistance the core DNA of the dispute, and the time that issue arose, may offer in identifying that mutual agreement.

The CJEU held last week. While it certainly may be said that the AG’s approach, in particular the reference to locus regit actum, is unorthodox and perhaps a touch convoluted, the CJEU’s approach is simply confusing as Ugljesa Grusic implies.

A reminder that the case formally concerns the Rome Convention, not the Rome Regulation however the provisions do not materially differ.

The novelty of the question in current case is the period of work to be taken into account in determining which law is applicable if the employee has worked for his or her employer in two separate stages: first, in several States and next, during the period preceding the end of the employment relationship, on a permanent basis in a single State, which parties clearly intend to be the new place of habitual performance.

The CJEU would seem to have sided with the French Government’s approach, that the most recent period of work could be taken into account in the use of the overall escape clause in Article 6, in order to determine, in the light of all of the relevant circumstances, the existence of closer connections with another country than that indicated by the other limbs of Article 6.

The CJEU as Ugljesa excellently summarises, holds that the change in habitual place of performance in its view makes the application of the ordinary test (identification of a habitual place of performance, which then leads to the lex causae) impossible; this then ordinarily triggers as a fall-back the law of the country of the engaging place of business.

However the Court then emphasises the core objective of the provisions on employment contracts: guaranteeing adequate protection for the employee, and the role of the escape clause in that respect: it must ensure that the law applied to the employment contract is the law of the country with which that contract is most closely connected (reference to CJEU Schlecker, [34]).

This then brings the last limb of Article 6(2) of the Rome Convention to the fore: where it is apparent from the circumstances as a whole that the contract of employment is more closely connected with another country, it is for the national court to disregard the connecting factors referred to in Article 6(2)(a) and (b) of the Rome Convention and to apply the law of that other country. The referring court is therefore invited seriously to consider the place where the employee has carried out his or her work on a permanent basis during the most recent period of the performance of his or her contract of employment, which place is intended to become a new habitual place of work, as the ‘proper law’ of the contract, for the Court holds, this is in line with the favor laboris objective. [61] the Court also suggests this assists with predictability however that, as Ugljesa also notes, would seem optimistic.

Like Ugljesa, I would suggest that the law of the intended new habitual place of work should apply as the objectively applicable law under Article 6(2)(a), rather than under the escape clause. This would serve party autonomy, predictability and favor laboris (seeing as the place is mutually agreed) more than the use of the escape clause, the position of which I feel is overpromoted with current judgment.

Geert.

EU Private International Law, 4th ed 2024, 3.39 ff.

Applicable law, cross-border employmentRome ConventionCJEU C‑485/24 Locatrans curia.europa.eu/juris/docume…Court does not seem to follow AG gavclaw.com/2025/09/09/l…CJEU zooms in difficulties of lex voluntatis, focuses on place of business through which employee was engagedMore soonish

— Geert Van Calster (@gavclaw.bsky.social) 2025-12-11T09:49:25.652Z

On 19th December 2025, from 10-12 CET, the European Civil Justice Centre hosts a webinar on Data protection and collective actions from a US, European and cross-border perspective.

The fast-paced development of digital technologies, and the massive, cross-border, global dimension of the processing of personal data in the Internet, have necessitated the collective enforcement of data protection rights.

This seminar delves into developments in European collective actions, mass violations of data subjects’ rights, and the use of collective actions for the protection of supra-individual and homogeneous interests in Europe and the US, and aspects of cross-border litigation.

The focus of the seminar will the research conducted by Marina Federico (Naples University) for her book Protezione dei dati personali e tutela collettiva published in 2024.

Registration for free on Eventbrite here.

Program

10.00 Xandra Kramer (Erasmus University Rotterdam/European Civil Justice Centre) – Opening and welcome

10.05 Stefaan Voet (KU Leuven/ European Civil Justice Centre) – Introduction: Developments in European collective redress

10.25 Marina Federico (University of Naples “Parthenope”) – Data protection and collective actions. Itineraries of legal comparison in Europe and the United States

11.00 Eduardo Silva de Freitas (TMC Asser Institute/Erasmus University Rotterdam) – An Apple a day won’t keep litigation away: private international law’s new path for collective data protection claims

11.15 Discussion, moderated by Stefaan Voet

This post was written by Dr Franziska Arnold-Dwyer, Associate Professor of Law at University College London (UCL). On 24 November 2025, the Privy Council handed down judgment in Credit Suisse Life (Bermuda) Ltd v Ivanishvili [2025] UKPC 53 in an appeal from the Court of Appeal for Bermuda. By way of background, it is worth […]

The decision in case C-240/24, BNP Paribas Fortis, will be delivered on 18 December. After a Belgium bank refused to acknowledge the legitimation effect of a European Certificate of Succession issued in Poland, the issuing notary (the Notary in Krapkowice Justyna Gawlica – Krapkowice, Poland) started on its own motion proceedings to withdraw the certificate. […]

Henrike von Scheliha (Bucerius Law School) is currently looking to hire a Research Fellow (with the option to prepare a PhD thesis under her supervision) in German Family and/or Succession Law.

More information is available here.

The European Association of Private International Law calls for expressions of interest from its members to participate in a Working Group on the Jurisdiction Project of the Hague Conference on Private International Law. The immediate goal of the EAPIL Working Group would be to answer to the public consultation on the draft text developed by […]

Had someone asked me before 11 December 2025 to select three key principles underlying the application of Article 6 of the Rome Convention and Article 8 of the Rome I Regulation, dealing with the law applicable to individual employment contracts, I would probably have listed the following: Identical interpretation of the connecting factor of the […]

Leonard Maximilian Wagner is the author of Die internationalprivatrechtliche Qualifikation, a monograph on the issue fo characterisation, or qualification, as it arises in the context of conflict-of-laws rules, recently published by Mohr Siebeck in its Studien zum ausländischen und internationalen Privatrecht series. Since its discovery, the question of how to identify the relevant choice of […]

This post was written by Marco Pasqua (PhD, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan). It is the final contribution to the EAPIL on-line symposium on the judgment of the Court of Justice in Cupriak-Trojan. The previous posts were written by Laima Vaige, Alina Tryfonidou, Elizabeth Perry and Anna Wysocka-Bar, and can be found […]

The third edition of the EAPIL Winter School will take place in Como between 2 and 6 February 2026. The upcoming edition’s general topic is Values in Private International Law. Day 1 will be about the protection of weaker contractual parties. The concerns surrounding torts will be dealt with in Day 2. Day 3, on […]

The second annual conference of the Australasian Association of Private International Law will be held from Friday 17 to Saturday 18 April at Ashurst’s offices in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, sponsored by Ashurst.

We are pleased to invite the submission of paper proposals for the conference on any aspect of private international law, broadly understood.  This includes issues of jurisdiction, choice of law, the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments (including how they relate to cross-border issues within a federation), and all areas of private law that raise cross-border and transnational issues.

Paper proposals should be made on this form by Friday 30 January 2026. We also welcome panel proposals. Please email m.keyes@griffith.edu.au if you have a proposal for a panel. Proposed presenters on any panel will be required to submit individual paper proposals.

We welcome anyone interested in private international law, including from the judiciary, legal practice, government, and the academy, from any jurisdiction.  Attendees, including presenters, will be required to pay a registration fee. A conference dinner will be held on the evening of Friday 17 April, at an additional cost.

To keep up to date with AAPrIL events, please connect with us on LinkedIn.

This post was written by Anna Wysocka-Bar (Jagiellonian University). It is the fourth contribution to the EAPIL on-line symposium on the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Cupriak-Trojan. The previous posts, by Laima Vaige, Alina Tryfonidou and Elizabeth Perry, can be found here, here and here, respectively. In this post I would […]

You are invited to the next Migration Talk organized by the Jean Monnet Chair in Legal Aspects of Migration Management in the European Union and in Türkiye by Leyla Kayac?k (Human Rights Expert/ Council of Europe Former Special Representative of the Secretary General on Migration and Refugees) on “Border Control & Migration: Safeguarding Fundamental Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”.

Venue: Online via Zoom
Date: 17 December 2025, Wednesday
Time: 12:30 – 13:20 (UTC +3)
The Zoom link shall be provided upon request: migration@bilkent.edu.tr

This post was written by Elizabeth Stuart Perry, Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at Department of Law at Uppsala University and a Californian attorney. It is the third contribution to the EAPIL online symposium on the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Cupriak Trojan. The previous posts, by Laima Vaige and Alina […]

I know we all got pretty excited (if not in the least enthusiastic) by the Grand Chamber ruling in Apple last week. However there was another Private International ruling which involved President Lenaerts (I mention that because he is an authority on PrivIntLaw and my predecessor in the chair here at Leuven).

In Case C‑279/24 AY v Liechtensteinische Landesbank (Österreich) AG, the Court held that the consumer section of Rome I does not apply to a contract concluded between a consumer and a bank where the conditions set out in that provision were not met on the date on which that contract was concluded, but are subsequently met.

In the case at issue, on the date on which the contract concerned was concluded, the Austrian bank concerned was not pursuing its commercial or professional activities in the country where the consumer had his or her habitual residence, and was not directing them to that country. The conditions set out in A6(1)(a) or (b) Rome I were not met therefore. It is only later that this was the case: AY took part in an event organised in Padua (Italy) by an Italian investment company (‘the Padua event’), during which the managing director of that company presented a fund whose portfolio also included ETNs – exchange trade notes, for which AY had earlier opened an account. An employee of the bank also took part in that event in order to introduce the bank to the investors in attendance. Had AY only then opened his account, it would have been a consumer contract.

The CJEU emphasised [33] Rome I’s foreseeability pedigree, [37] legal certainty, and [34] ff party autonomy.

Note the difference with CJEU Commerzbank where, for the jurisdictional angle to consumer contracts, the emergence of an ‘international’ element post contract formation did not stand in the way of the deployment of EU PrivIntLaw.

Geert.

 

 

This post was written by Alina Tryfonidou, Assistant Professor in EU law and Family law at the University of Cyprus. It is the second contribution to the EAPIL on-line symposium on the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Cupriak Trojan. The previous post, by Laima Vaige, can be found here. […]

This post was written by Laima Vaigė, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Private International Law at Uppsala University. It is the first contribution to the EAPIL online symposium on the ruling of the Court of Justice in Cupriak-Trojan. The Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a landmark Grand Chamber judgment in Cupriak-Trojan (C-713/23) […]