Legal Journals

Dutch Articles on the Rome I Regulation

By Gilles Cuniberti

The last issue of the Dutch review of private international law (NIPR Nederlands internationaal privaatrecht) includes several articles on the Rome I Regulation, including four in English.

Michael Bogdan (Lund University): The Rome I Regulation on the law applicable to contractual obligations and the choice of law by the parties

 The Rome Convention of 19 June 1980 on the Law Applicable to Contratual Obligations (in the following ‘the Rome Convention’) will be replaced on 17 December 2009, in all Member States of the European Union except Denmark, by the EC Regulation No 593/2008 on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations (the Rome I Regulation) although only in relation to contracts concluded after that date. The Commission’s proposal of 2005 (in the following ‘The Commission’s proposal’), which led to the adoption of the Rome I Regulation after a number of amendments, stated that it did not set out to establish a new set of conflict rules but rather convert an existing convention into a Community law instrument. Nevertheless, the Regulation brings about several important changes in comparison with the Rome Convention.

Teun Struycken (Utrecht University and Nauta Dutilh, Amsterdam) and Bart Bierman (Nauta Dutilh, Amsterdam): Rome I on contracts concluded in multilateral systems.

Agreements are usually tested when the going gets tough. The turmoil on the financial markets over the past two years has shown once again that financial market participants require legal clarity and certainty regarding their contractual relationships. Such clarity and certainty are especially crucial with regard to the law applicable to transactions on stock markets and other securities trading systems.

Jonathan Hill (Bristol University): Article 6 of the Rome I Regulation: Much Ado about nothing 

Consumer contracts are typically standard-form contracts, the terms of which are drafted by (or on behalf of) suppliers. As the consumer has no influence over the substance of the contract, one of the perceived dangers is that a supplier may include in the contract a choice-of-law clause which selects a law which favours the interest of the supplier over those of theconsumer. This danger suggests that, in order to ensure that consumers are not deprived of the level of legal protection which they may legitimately expect, the choice-of-law rules applicable to consumer contracts should differ from those which apply to contracts in general (and which are founded on the principle of party autonomy).

Christian Heinze (Max Planck Institute, Hamburg): Insurance contracts under the Rome I Regulation.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every viryue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter’. these words written by Edmund Burke more then 200 years ago still seem to be a fair description of the legislative process in the democracies today. They hold particularly true at the European level where compromise is notoriously difficult, in particular if the national backgrounds are as disparate as they are in insurance law. Article 7 of the European Regulation NOo 593/2008 on the law applicable to contractual obligations (hereafter abbreviated as ‘Rome I’), the rule titled ‘insurance contracts’, is exactly that, a compromise.

Articles of NIPR can be downloaded here by suscribers.

Related posts:

1. Rome I: Council’s Compromise Package, Insurance Contracts, Financial Aspects Relating to Articles 4 and 5 Following our post on the note from the Luxembourg...
2. Articles on Rome II and Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements The current issue (Vol. 73, No. 1, January 2009)...
3. Rome I Regulation – A Dangerous Proposal? Stuart Dutson (Linklaters) has written an article in the...

Full post as published by Conflict of Laws on January 06, 2010 (boomark / email).