Summary

The proposal of the European Commission for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on a Common European Sales Law, published on 11 October 2011, is the first step towards creating a common European private law system. Thus, harmonisation of contract law that used to be of academic interest has become part of policy supporting the internal market of the European Union, as the general objective of the proposal is to improve the establishment and the functioning of the internal market, facilitate cross-border trade for businesses and cross-border purchases for consumers.

The article provides an overview of the harmonisation of European contract law as an academic pursuit and the evolvement of contract law into a means for achieving political objectives, analyses the substantive differences of a new contract law instrument compared to the former ones and discusses the prospects of national law in the context of competition between rules of the same level.