The One and the Many: Translating Insights from Constitutional Pluralism to European Contract Law Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract : While freedom of contract has generally been recognized as a leading principle of European contract law, national contract laws as well as EU measures show remarkable differences with respect to the limits they impose on contractual freedom in light of the public interest or common good. Whereas some private legal scholars aspire to relate all rules of private law to a single value (monist theories), others consider it impossible to find such a common denominator (radical pluralist theories). In this paper, it is submitted that a moderate pluralist theory offers the most convincing narrative to explain current developments in this field, since it defines a meta-level on which diverging ideas of contract law can be reconciled by the definition of coordinating principles. These meta-principles indicate which conception of the common good prevails in a specific case and on which level (European or national) final decision-making authority is allocated in that case. Through an analysis of examples from case law (the story of the CJEU's Viking and Laval judgments and the Court's recent decision in the Aziz case), it is argued that a moderately pluralist theory also provides the most convincing normative model for the further development of European contract law. Résumé : Bien que la liberté contractuelle soit largement reconnue comme l'un des principes directeurs du droit européen des contrats, des différences remarquables existent entre les droits des contrats nationaux aussi bien qu'avec les instruments européens en ce qui concerne les limites posées à la liberté contractuelle pour la protection de l'intérêt public ou du bien commun. Alors que certains spécialistes du droit cherchent à relier toutes les règles du droit privé à une valeur unique (theories monistes), d'autres considèrent impossible de trouver un tel dénominateur commun (théories pluralistes radicales). Dans cet article, il est soutenu qu'une théorie pluraliste modérée offre le narratif le plus convaincant pour expliquer les développements actuels dans ce domaine, puisque cette théorie définit un niveau intermédiaire sur lequel des idées divergentes du droit des contrats peuvent être réconciliées par la détermination de principes coordinateurs. Ces méta-principes indiquent quelle conception du bien commun prévaut dans un cas particulier et à quell niveau (européen ou national) l'autorité de prendre la décision finale est allouée dans chaque cas. Sur la base d'une analyse de deux exemples tirés de la jurisprudence (les jugements Viking et Laval de la Cour de Justice de l'UE, et le jugement récent de la Cour dans l'affaire Aziz ) il apparaît qu'une théorie pluraliste modérée présente le modèle normatif le plus convaincant pour le développement futur du droit européen des contrats.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".