The creation of a private law applicable for all Member States of the European Union represents one of the most significant developments of our time. The legislature of the EU has, however, primarily limited itself to short-term considerations driven by the politics of the day. The framework of regulations that has been promulgated in the past two decades is, as a result, fragmentary and has failed to follow an over-arching systematic approach. Responding to this development, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law published in 2009 the Handwörterbuch des Europäischen Privatrechts. Now, the Oxford University Press has released the Max Planck Encyclopedia of European Private Law. More than merely a translation, it stands as an independent work tailored to the varying legal backgrounds of international readers. Consistent with the format of an encyclopedia, the core of the work is comprised by the approximately 500 keyword entries which are presented alphabetically. Yet on account of the complexity of the material, the Encyclopedia offers far more information than a simple dictionary. With an editorial focus on the foundational content and principles of European private law, the work may serve to orient scholarship and legal practice within the context of the legal unification increasingly pursued by the European legislator. The work has been edited by Institute Director Jürgen Basedow, Institute Director  Reinhard Zimmermann and former Institute Director Klaus J. Hopt, with Andreas. The authors of the keyword entries are primarily current or former fellows of the Institute but include also a number of external scholars having a close and special affinity to the Institute.

More information is available on the publisher’s website.

Horatia Muir Watt (Sciences Po Law School) has posted a new version of her paper on Private International Law as Global Governance: Beyond the Schism, from Closet to Planet on the PILAGG website. The abstract reads:

Despite the contemporary turn to law within the global governance debate, private international law remains remarkably silent before the increasingly unequal distrib tion of wealth and power in the world. By leaving such matters to its public international counterpart, it leaves largely untended the private causes of crisis and injustice affecting such areas as financial markets, levels of environmental pollution, the status of sovereign debt, the confiscation of natural resources, the use and misuse of development aid, the plight of migrating populations, and many more. This incapacity to rise to the private challenges of economic globalisation is all the more curious that public international law itself, on the tide of managerialism and fragmentation, is now increasingly confronted with conflicts articulated as collisions of jurisdiction and applicable law, among which private or hybrid authorities and regimes now occupy a significant place. The explanation seems to lie in the development, under the aegis of the liberal separation of law and politics and of the public and the private spheres, of an « epistemology of the closet », a refusal to see that to unleash powerful private interests in the name of individual autonomy and to allow them to accede to market authority was to construct the legal foundations of informal empire and establish gaping holes in global governance. It is now more than time to de-closet private international law and excavate the means with which, in its own right, it may impact on the balance of informal power in the global economy. Adopting a planetary perspective means reaching beyond the schism and connecting up with the politics of public international law, while contributing a specific savoir-faire acquired over many centuries in the recognition of alterity and the responsible management of pluralism.

Prof. Zamora Cabot’s course on Human Rights (Donostia-San Sebastian, May 2011), entitled  “La responsabilidad de las empresas multinacionales por violaciones de los derechos humanos: práctica reciente” has just been published in Papeles “El tiempo de los derechos” (ISSN: 1989-8797), and can be downloaded here. In due course it will also appear in the standard form in which these courses are usually published.

The author addresses the most relevant and contemporary items on the topic of human rights, multinational corporations and responsibility: the Protect Respect and Remedy framework of the UN, the Dahl Model Law, the Kiobel case under revision by the USSC…  He also analyses five cases concerning the mineral extraction sector and Canadian companies, and another five of other business areas, among which the case of illness inoculations in Guatemala, involving the U.S. Government.

Worth remarking are the very extensive documentation that supports the study and the selection of cases, from which a panorama of the most interesting data about the current situation of litigation against multinational corporations for human rights violations may be inferred. As means of conclusion, the author speaks in favor of private litigation as necessary in order to compensate -even if only in part -the victims of the atrocities, and also as and effective tool for deterrence.

With this publication Professor Zamora Cabot goes one step further in his already rich literary production (so far probably the richest in Spanish) centered on disputes under the ATS in the business-human rights realm.