The External Dimension of European Private Law (EDEPL) is funded by the Academy of Finland. Distinguished as research of scientific excellence, the project receives funding under the Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) funding programme.
The FiDiPro/EDEPL project focuses on searching for the potential influence and impact of the European Union on international organizations and institutions in private law making, on powerful states such as the United States, Brazil, China, Japan and Russia as well as on economic regions such as Mercosur, the ASEAN Countries and Africa. The perspective has been changed from inward to outward, to private law beyond the European Union and through the European Union. The project is built around the vertical (regulatory private law in the various sector related markets) and the horizontal (the interaction between European Union Civil/Contract Code building and similar attempts in the various economic regions around the world) dimensions of private law beyond the European Union, in order to develop a deeper understanding of the transformation processes that private law rules are currently undergoing. European private law (regulatory and traditional contract law) in its internal and external dimension is suggested to serve as a blueprint and model for the development of a normative design of bifurcated private law.
Research on the external dimension of European Private Law is still in its infancy. However, it is possible to group the debate around four major observations which seem to hold the external European private law together and which indicate a move: (1) (from) legal rules and (to) legal practice; (2) (from) formal law making and (to) European governance; (3) (from) substantive law and (to) procedural law; (4) (from) private law and (to) trade law. It will have to be shown that the ‘from… to’ by and large corresponds to the distinction between traditional private law and regulatory private law.