Contract Law and Regulation

Abstract

This chapter, to be published in a collection of essays on comparative contract law, maps the interplay between the field of traditional contract law and the field of regulation. The main argument is that every regulatory state has to deal with the governance issues involved in such an interplay. Those issues include the choice of the rulemaking and enforcement level, the relationship among levels, the content and type of contractual rules, the role played by private regulation, and the normative criteria to assess the economic and distributive impacts. The analysis of these issues shows the emergence of a regulatory contract law, that is a body of rules that exploits contractual relationships to accomplish regulatory goals. How regulatory contract law is designed depends on the peculiar features of the regulatory state that become dominant in a specific legal system. Examples from Western (EU and US) and non Western legal traditions suggest that regulatory contract law can take on different meanings in different contexts.

Keywords: Contract law, Regulation, Comparative Law

JEL Classification: K12, K23