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The EU Commission has proposed an optional Common European Sales Law (CESL) whose main purpose is the reduction of the legal costs of cross-border contracting. This paper outlines the Commission's view as to these current legal costs and how its proposal would reduce them, and then compares these with the likely costs of operation of the CESL. It identifies these likely costs as lying in the complex legal framework into which the CESL would be set; the relative uncertainty of the concepts used by the CESL and of its substantive scope; and the significance of national judicial evaluations required by the complex legal standards used by the CESL, of which the most prominent is 'good faith and fair dealing'. The paper concludes that a number of the costs which the Commission expects to be saved by use of the CESL are likely to find parallels in costs generated by its use and that, owing to its own characteristics, the CESL is likely to generate its own further and new legal costs.

AbstractThis article considers the possible relationship between EU legislation governing private international law and legislation governing substantive law in the light of recent moves towards 'full harmonisation' and calls for greater consistency and coherence in European law-making. For this purpose, it considers the Product Liability Directive and the special product liability provisions in Article 5 of the Rome II Regulation on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations and asks how the understanding of 'product liability' compares in these two instruments, especially in relation to the distinctions between public and private law, general and special regulation and contract and tort.

Does european community law make any requirement as to the language in which the terms of consumer contracts are to be expressed?At the outset, I need to explain that the significance of this question (and its answer) will differ according to what is meant by the word 'language' itself. A first meaning is found where one refers to English, French, or Chinese as a 'language', that is, to quote theOxford English Dictionary, 'a system of communication used by a particular country or community'. A second meaning of 'language', again as explained by theOxford English Dictionary, refers to 'the manner or style of a piece of writing or speech'; so, for example, one may describe a piece of prose as being written in simple or elaborate, verbose or laconic, language. To avoid confusion in the following discussion, I shall refer to these two different significances as 'language type' and 'language style'.