Volume 14, Issue 2

Resolving legal problems at the national and European level, legal principles are of outstanding significance. However, it often remains unclear how to utilise these legal principles – which are partly not codified – in the specific legal solution. This article addresses two questions: How can we derive legal principles from the law if they have not been codified in the law? Moreover, how can we concretise legal principles? These two main issues will be illustrated on the basis of contractual freedom and particular legal institutes such as obligation to contract, price control, and frustration of contract. A last issue will be to tackle methodical difficulties posed by legal principles at the European level.

Distribution networks are widely used in the international trade as a tool for bringing another party’s products on to the market. However, in international business relations it may be difficult to establish the governing law for distribution agreements and contracts of sale. This article analyses the rules for determining the law applicable to distribution agreements and determines the impact of these rules and the law applicable to a distribution agreement on the applicable law for the sales contracts formed under the agreement. The thesis of the article is that the specific nature of distribution agreements manifesting itself in a bond between distributorship (as a framework agreement) and contracts of sale (as the application contracts) has implications for the determination of the applicable law for the sales contracts.

This article discusses the legal consequences of corporate market communication in the field of environmental protection in European consumer sales law. It analyses first the potential of such market communication to influence the seller’s obligations within a consumer contract. Second, it suggests that the assessment of such market communication as to its market fairness under European unfair commercial practices law may influence the assessment of the correct contract performance under the Consumer Sales Directive. Finally, the article focuses on the remedies that are available to the consumer against the seller in case of a breach of such a contractual environmental obligation. On this point, it is argued that the remedies under consumer sales law for the delivery of a non-conforming good need to be interpreted in the light of the public (environmental) purpose that can reasonably be expected by the consumer who is addressed by such environmental market communication.