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7 ERA F. 4 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/erafrum7 and id is 1 raw text is: Wolfgang Heusel E European Contract Law - Towards a European Frame of Reference Wolfgang Heusel* I. Drafting common principles of European contract law: bridging the gap between practitioners and researchers Alongside the Europeanisation of private international law in the EU, the emergence of a European contract law has been studied at conferences organised by the Academy of European Law (ERA) in Trier for about a decade.' The growing range and ever increasing impact of European consumer protection rules, the unavoidable inconsistency between these and codified principles of national contract law in continental legal systems, the piecemeal approach and avoidable lack of coherence among the European consumer rules themselves, and repeated calls for codification in one sense or the other have offered us many a good reason for conferences and debate.2 ERA's involvement in the Joint Network on European Private Law in 2005 has given our interest in European contract law a new dimension.' ERA, as a founding member of the Network, has assumed the task of organising a series of conferences in which stakeholders and practitioners will meet the researchers and discuss the various draft principles for a European contract law which have been proposed. The Research Network is the result of the European Commission's 2003 Action Plan for a more coherent European Contract Law4 and its 2004 Communication on the creation of a Common Frame of Reference (CFR).5 The creation of the CFR was also made a priority by the European Council in its 2004 Hague Programme6 and included in the 2005 Action Plan on the implementation of the Hague Programme.' * Dr Wolfgang Heusel, Director, Academy of European Law (ERA), Trier. The Europeanisation of Private International Law was discussed at an ERA conference in Trier as early as 1993 (cf. Lagarde/v. Hoffmann, L'europeanisation du droit international priv6, vol. 8 of the ERA series of publications). A first ERA conference on New European Contract Law and Consumer Protection was organised in Brussels in 1997 (cf. Heusel. Neues europaisches vertragsrecht and verbraucherschutz, vol. 25 of the ERA series of publications). Codification in the classical sense of drafting a European Civil Code, as called for by the European Parliament in its 1989 and 1994 resolutions (resolution of 26.5.1989, OJ C158, 28.6.1989, and resolution of 6.5.1994, OJ C205, 25.7.1994), or rather in the sense of a consolidation of the existing European consumer law, cf. Drobnig in Heusel (ed.), Neues europaisches vertragsrecht und verbraucherschutz, vol. 25 of the ERA series of publications, p. 202, or van Gerven's bottom-up approach as presented in the lus commune casebooks for the common law of Europe series. The European Parliament's position is again reflected in the call for a common civil law in the report by K.-H. Lehne adopted by the Legal Committee on 23.2.2006 (doc. A6-55/2006-Final, 2.3.2006). The Joint Network on European Private Law was created under the Sixth Research Framework Programme. Its members are: the Study Group on a European Civil Code, Osnabruck; the Acquis Group, Bielefeld/Turin; the Insurance Group, Innsbruck; the Association Henri Capitant, Paris; the Common Core Group, Turin/Trieste; the Economic Impact Group, Tilburg; the Database Group (Institut Charles Dumoulin), Paris; and ERA. Cf. also Fuchs et al., A Common Frame of Reference - How should it be filled?, in: ERA Forum 2/2003, 99. COM(2003) 68 final, 12.2.2003. European contract law and the revision of the acquis: the way forward, COM(2004) 651 final, 11.10.2004. 6 Council doc. 16054/04, 13.12.2004, p.32 (in section 3.4.4 entitled Ensuring coherence and upgrading the quality of EU legislation). ? Council and Commission Action Plan implementing the Hague Programme, Council doc. 9778/2/05 rev. 2, JAI 207, 10.6.2005, p. 26 (in section 4.3 Judicial cooperation in civil matters / Ensuring consistency, action (x) Adoption of a common frame of reference (CFR) in the field of European contract law (2009)).