Stefan Grundmann, Hans Micklitz, and Moritz Renner’s New Private Law Theory: A Pluralist Approach is a wide-ranging, ambitious, and fascinating project. In this article I offer one way to read the NPLT as a mosaic, rather than a patchwork, by first taking seriously the idea of legal theory as the core of NPLT’s methodological commitments, and second taking seriously its subject matter of private law as the source of its substantive underpinnings.

Legal theory, I argue (much in line with GMR’s rich text), is distinctive from other discourses about law given its acute awareness to law’s normative filter, which furthermore implies a synthetic commitment that these other discourses do not share. But legal theory should also, I claim, be attentive to the constitutive role law plays in constructing the building-blocks of many of our interpersonal interactions, and it should thus be particularly cautious from relying on philosophical or social scientific inquiries that take contingent configurations of property or of contract as a given. This lesson, in turn, is crucial for contemporary discussions of private law obligations that go beyond the libertarian duty of non-interference. Rather than reifying the libertarian conceptions of property and contract and resorting to exogenous justifications for our interpersonal obligations of non-discrimination and accommodation, private law theory can—and indeed should—rely on happier conceptions of these core legal institutions, which vindicate the freestanding significance of these obligations and thus also validate their transnational applicability.

New Private Law Theory: A Pluralist Approach is a new kind of book. Nevertheless, the book does have forebearers, as innovation is itself an old practice. The best way to understand the book, therefore, is to look farther afield, to a prior effort to produce a new kind of legal book—the first casebook ever published. Christopher Columbus Langdell’s Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts landed in circumstances that could hardly have been more different from the ones that A Pluralist Approach now engages. But these shallow differences should not be allowed to disguise a shared ambition, which these pages hope to lay bare. Uncovering the book’s deeper ambition will make it possible to assess its prospects for success.

This article reflects upon the challenges arising from a “pluralistic” approach to private law theory. Having distinguished the different meanings of the notion of “pluralism”, it focuses on epistemic pluralism and stresses the importance of an interdisciplinary stance. At the same time, it criticizes the emphasis put mainly on the dialogue with social sciences, clearly mirrored by the traditional organization of the ERC panels. Finally, it advocates a deeper and more critical engagement with the economic approaches to law.

Taking as a starting point the book by Grundmann, Micklitz and Renner, New Private Law Theory, the author briefly examines the methods practised today in the most important legal systems for studying private law. There is no unanimous consensus on the definition of “private law”, nor on its functions. The formalistic method prevails, using terms, concepts, dogmas stratified over time, with an apparently technical content. In reality, as the three authors demonstrate, and as has been preached in Italy for more than half a century, law is a social science and its function can only be fully understood by combining the formalistic method with economic, sociological and political analysis and considering its historical development.

The suggestion that the new private law theory would have to stand the test of acceptance by the global legal community raises a question. Who is that “global legal community?” And does it go beyond Europe? Close reading demonstrates that the non-European world is present and hidden at the same time. It is present because much of the material presented, many of the theories discussed, have transnational materials. However, the non-European world is hidden at the same time because it remains unaddressed, marginalized, and ignored. Including the Global South would make necessary a more radical pluralization of private law theory. This opens up the possibility of new, very different idea of a global legal community that is more improbable but also more attractive.

This review of Grundmann, Micklitz and Renner’s New Private Law Theory begins by noting its historical perspective, and the fruitfulness of setting alongside each other seminal writings of European jurists from the early twentieth century with the contributions of American law and economics and critical legal scholars from the late twentieth and early twenty-first. A century ago, legal scholarship was addressing the “social question:” How to accommodate private law to the demands of a rising working class? Today, steepening inequality and polarization have brought the social question, and with it class politics, back into view. Using as a case study the mass sackings engineered by the shipping company P&O in March 2022, we can see that today’s private law is deeply implicated in the generation of structural disadvantage. A private law more concerned with extracting and hiding wealth than creating it might be thought to have a limited future.

In conversation with several chapters of Stefan Grundmann’s, Hans Micklitz’s, and Moritz Renner’s book on New Private Law Theory, this paper reflects on contributions that theories of communication and constitutionalization can make to our understanding of the changing role of private law in a globalizing world. More abstract ideals are checked against an assessment of recent judgments of Dutch courts in cases regarding oil company Shell’s responsibility for environmental pollution in Nigeria. Such theoretical readings of case law, it is held, in the spirit of New Private Law Theory, show new directions that private law theories may choose in order to understand and strengthen the private-legal framework for societal questions of our times.

New Private Law Theory (“NPLT”) offers itself as almost a natural fit for legal education and in particular—I argue—legal education in the climate crisis. Yet, the world climate hardly features in the book and its impressive resource list. Without claiming to fill any existing gaps in the book, the Article seeks to articulate NPLT’s relevance to sustainable legal education and at the same time tease out what facing the, social, fact of the climate crisis would add to NPLT’s already rich framework.

This article argues that the New Private Law Theory (NPLT) recently proposed by Grundmann, Micklitz, and Renner is radically multi-pluralist, in that it combines pluralism along a multitude of dimensions with the absence of any organizing or constraining principle on the meta level. Consequently, the NPLT makes no epistemic commitments about private law truth or ontological commitments about private law reality. The article raises the question of whether a theory which makes no such commitments is a theory at all. Indeed, a site where quite divergent epistemic and ontological commitments are equally acceptable is not usually referred to as a theory but as a democracy. Therefore, the article discusses how NPLT could be turned into a democratic theory of private law. It concludes that to that end, NPLT’s selection of materials should be more diverse, in particular, less economically oriented, less Eurocentric, and more inclusive of various critical perspectives.

The author makes brief Considerations on the Treatment of the Theme of the Relationship Between New Technologies and Private Law. In particular, she believes that the criticism of Lessig’s statement according to which “the values of real-space sovereigns will at first lose out” is correct, adding, however, that one must monitor the evolution of new technologies. We are, in fact, at the crossroads of a technological revolution which, as jurists, we are not able to fully understand. The author also questions the position taken in the volume on the US neoliberal approach v. European solidarity approach, inviting the authors to question the difference between the narrative that sees the European system as all about ensuring solidarity and the reality about the economic thinking that informs the different disciplines. Finally, she takes a position on the relationship between ordoliberalism and consumer protection.