Regulatory competition in contract law and dispute resolution : [edited versions of papers presented during an international conference at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich from 13 to 15 October 2011]
This comment on a contribution by Giesela Rühl sheds more light on two critical aspects of the market for contract law. For one thing, many practitioners and academics believe that parties often choose the applicable law without regard to its legal content. Correspondingly, it is questioned whether states really adjust their contract law in response to competition from other jurisdictions. Indeed, the parties can have good reasons to focus on features other than the intrinsic quality of contract laws. The economics of network effects explain why it may be more important to use the same law as everybody else than to find the law that best fits the contractual relationship. There is circumstantial evidence that network effects guide choice of law at least in certain areas. Even in the presence of network effects, however, jurisdictional competition can still be valuable.
For another thing, choice of law also seems to reflect differences in legal content. In this regard, jurisdictional competition is sometimes accused of undermining the ability of the law to regulate market failure. To analyze this, the ‘selection principle’ introduced by Professor Hans-Werner Sinn is applied to contract law. It turns out that law markets are indeed more prone to failure than markets in other goods. At the same time, it would be overly pessimistic to predict that the law market always replicates a failure in the underlying product or service market.
Dieser Eintrag ist Teil der Universitätsbibliographie.
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