Stefan Grundmann
The future of contract law – in Europe – will almost certainly be much less national, perhaps a bit more international, but mainly more supranational – European – than today.
Biography
Stefan Grundmann, Prof. Dr. Dr., LL.M., has been Professor at Humboldt-University, Berlin, for German, European and International Private and Business Law since 2004. He heads the Institute for banking and capital market law. He is currently the deputy of the faculty within the steering committee of the European Law School. From 2001 to 2004 he had been professor for the same subjects in Erlangen, where he also headed the interdisciplinary Institute for European Business Law. From 1995 he held a Professorship at the Martin-Luther-University in Halle-Wittenberg, where he founded the Institute for Business Law.
He studied in Munich, Aix-en-Provence, Lausanne, Lisbon and Berkeley. He specialises in three areas: his book Fiduciary Duties and Trust relationships (1997) deals with the central themes in the area of foreign businesses management, including asset management services on a professional level. Civil law and business law are both covered in Bank and Capital Market Law (Financial Law), his second research specialisation. His book European Bank Supervisory Law (1990), includes numerous papers and commentaries about half of the Bank Laws for the major Commentary Ebenroth/Boujong/Joost (2001, 2009). European Private Law is also comprehensively covered with his research into organisation and business management. His last specialisation is in the area of European Contract Law (as per the ZGR special publication European Contract Law (1999, 2nd ed. 2011).
Prof. Grundmann has also organised several conferences for the discussion of key topics and founded the Society of European Contract Law (SECOLA). Since 2005 he is editor-in-chief of the European Review of Contract Law. In 2004 Prof. Grundmann published European Company Law" including Capital Market Law (2nd ed. 2007), of 10 text books in a series on Law in the Common Market, called IUS COMMUNITATIS.
Stefan Grundmann also studied philosophy and the history of art. He has written books on the paintings of Titian (1987), modern and postmodernist architecture (1995) and the architecture of the city of Rome (1997, 2007).
Abstract
The Future of Contract Law
This contribution asks the question whether at the turn of our millennium, we are living similarly fundamental change as, for instance, around the French revolution with the rise of party autonomy. With this, the contribution asks the question of the future of contract law. It does so primarily for Europe. To answer this question, it is argued that both institutionally and in substance contract law is indeed undergoing fundamental change, starting only a few decades ago. Contract law has become, in its dynamics, largely European, decreasingly national, and will become over the next few decades, in substance, method and style, even primarily European. It has become a law in which party autonomy and instruments of order and protection have become similarly important and this process will continue. Standard contract terms, consumer protection, anti-discrimination are only three buzz-words; the financial crisis will trigger further thinking. The aim is an equilibrium in which the material freedom of all parties concerned is best furthered. The article then discovers that a trend towards codification comes together with a trend not to consider the code as ‘universal order’ any longer; that a trend towards generalisation comes together with a trend to differentiate more, even in a general part of contract law: between different types of contract partners, different types of groups of contracts (spot contracts and long-term contracts), and different types of the formation of contracts. The article concludes with examining some core areas where major steps of modernisation have been taken lately and it forecasts that contract law will be more international, interdisciplinary, more interested in the rule-setting process, more market and business oriented, in short: that a similar discussion as with corporate governance will develop for contract governance on a European level.
