Ralf Michaels is invited by the Collège de France Assembly at the suggestion of Professor Samantha Besson.
Our daily way of life - our online shopping, our international travel, our consumption of coffee and oranges, our communication via zoom - is governed by rules of private law and private international law, and organized around fundamental concepts such as subjective rights, property, contract, tort, all rights and obligations protected and enforced across national borders by private international law. This way of life, scientists warn us, is not sustainable in the existential sense of the term : if we continue to live as we do now, humanity is doomed to extinction. Sustainability, as we now know, requires a balance not only between the economic (profit) and the social (people), but also the environmental (planet). Given planetary limits, growth too has its limits. This is bound to have consequences for private law and private international law.
What exactly are these consequences ? Surprisingly, this question is rarely asked as such. Private law, traditionally understood as the space of private self-organization, is often seen as isolated from the great political and existential questions of our time. Wars, pandemics, the climate crisis and many other challenges are seen as matters for public law (national and international), not private law. Of course, public law responses can have an impact on private law - for example, if armed conflict gives rise to sanctions, contract law is affected - but private law then becomes a mere recipient of these responses, rather than the space in which they are developed and implemented. When genuine responses are envisaged in and for private law, they tend to be limited - a right to reparation, for example, the extension of a contractual warranty period or, finally, new binding international rules in private international law - and, above all, remain relatively insignificant.
