Komparativ rätt

Principles of French Constitutional Law offers a concise and accessible account of the key principles and rules of constitutional law in the French legal system, presenting a muchneeded up-to-date overview of this rapidly changing subject.

The textbook explores the five essential pillars that underpin the teaching of constitutional law, namely the institutions, legal history, case law, comparative law, and current affairs and developments. It is split into two core sections: Part I examines the basis of French constitutional law, the theoretical developments about key notions of constitutional law such as the state and the constitution, as well as the historical background to French constitutional law. Part II provides students with an understanding of the current Fifth Republic and how constitutional rules are adopted and applied, and how they affect other areas of law and politics. It offers a critical account of the 1958 Constitution’s past, present, and future by placing it in its political and socio-historical contexts and critically assessing contemporary developments and constitutional reforms.

Given the growing expansion of this branch of law in the French legal system, this book will be essential reading for anyone studying French Law, Law with French, Comparative Constitutional Law, and European Legal Studies.

First published in 1999, this book focuses on the new role of private law in late modernity. It analyses the pressures for changes in this area of law due to the present processes of privatisation and marketisation. The perspective is welfarist: in what ways and to what extent can the welfare state expectations of the citizens be defended through private law mechanisms when state-offered security is diminishing? Which alternatives are available when developing private law? The questions are discussed against the background of theories concerning important features of late modern society, for example consumerism, risk, information, globalisation and fragmentation. Several fields of private law are analysed, such as private law theory, tort and liability law, contract law and credit law as well as access to justice issues. The approach is comparative, including analyses of both common law and continental law.

This book examines the greening of civil codes from a comparative perspective. It takes into account the increasing requirements of supranational rules, which favour measures to reduce global warming and its negative environmental impacts; it discusses the necessity to expand distributive justice given the current ecological emergency; and it reflects on which private law legal tools potentially may be employed to defend nature’s interests. The work fills a gap in the growing literature on developing rights of nature and ecosystem in transnational law. While the focus is on the environmental issues pertaining to the new civil codes and new projects of civil codes, the book promotes interdisciplinary research applicable to a range of environmental and natural resources–focused courses across the social sciences, especially those related to comparative law systems, legal anthropology, legal traditions in the world, political science and international relations.