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By way of examination of the implementation of the Sales Directive into French and English law, this chapter illustrates how EU Directives may trigger unexpected responses within Member States’ legal systems. With particular emphasis on the Directive’s approach to consumer remedies and the concept of conformity the chapter reveals how the encounter between European and domestic law may have ‘disintegrative’ effects at the national level. This does not bode well for harmonisation. The chapter suggests, however, that ‘disintegration’ and fragmentation need not be evaluated in negative terms since they provide opportunities for mutual transformation and learning. The chapter also assesses the proposal for a Consumer Rights Directive and the associated maximum harmonisation strategy which has come to the forefront of EU consumer policy in recent years. It concludes that the technique is fraught with difficulty in multi-level Europe.

Chapter 6 outlines the ongoing activities taking place in the debate about European contract law and their bearing on the constitutional dimensions of European contract law. These activities comprise three main components: the Common Frame of Reference (CFR) project, the Commission’s plans for the review of the consumer acquis leading to the adoption of the Consumer Rights Directive, and the possible enactment of one or more optional instruments of contract law and the promotion of EU model contract terms, which has recently reached a crucial culmination stage with the Commission’s proposal for a Regulation on a Common European Sales Law (proposed CESL).

This chapter provides a summary of a review of the wrap contracts of DTC companies providing genetic tests for health purposes. It identifies a number of terms that are problematic from a consumer protection standpoint and argues that certain terms commonly included in DTC contracts are liked to be challengeable on the grounds of unfairness under UK law.

The provisions governing the euro as ‘European Single Currency’ are at the core of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’s (TFEU) rules on the Economic Monetary Union (EMU). Since the euro has replaced the former national currencies of the participating Member States and is to substitute the national currencies of any future members of the euro area, it was mandatory to ascribe to the euro the status of exclusive ‘legal tender’ as per Article 128(1) TFEU. This status of the euro seems to be so evident as to be self-explanatory–but only at first glance since the concept of ‘legal tender’ and its implications in European Union (EU) and national private and public law are less clear. A satisfactory concept of legal tender is hard to define and hardly ever given on the EU level–resulting in a striking lack of legal certainty in a great variety of aspects of public and private law.

In the autumn of 2010 the editors of this volume ran a seminar within a summer school organized by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes in the French Maritime Alps. The aim of that seminar was a comparative assessment of the various ‘restatements’, ‘model laws’, ‘reference texts’, or ‘non-legislative codifications’ on European contract law that had by then been published. That assessment turned out to be much more interesting than we had originally envisaged, for we discovered that those texts were genetically related in unexpectedly complex ways. We had known before, of course, that some rules and formulations in later texts had been taken over or adapted from older texts and that a number of the restatements were also connected to the European Union’s acquis communautaire. But we had not been aware of the extent to which the texts were interrelated; nor had we appreciated the changes of wording and systematic context that had occurred. The mixture of complex genetic relationships, of correspondence and differences in formulation, and of shifts in approach and policy thus became more interesting, but also more difficult to understand.