The Interrelation between Rights and Duties in EU Law: Reflections on the State of Liability Law in the Multilevel Governance System of the Union: Is There a Need for a More Coherent Approach in European Private Law?

Summary:

This article aims to re-establish the symmetry between rights and obligations, which has been somewhat lost by the ‘vertical’ structure of European Union (EU) law, both in the primary law of free movement and the secondary law of directives.

The article uses various examples of case law as a starting point for the reflection.

In the article it is argued that there are signs in legal practice and theory showing that a need to rewrite the structure of EU law is felt, but without leading to results which could be called convincing. The most promising area in this respect is the law of civil liability in the EU, which had been developed as a remedy on its own right in the law of vertical state liability by the ECJ36 and will be taken as a conceptual and practical starting point for extending some of its basic findings also to ‘horizontal liability’.