What’s New in European Property Law?

Abstract

Following up on the first instalment of what will hopefully evolve into a long and fruitful series, this article intends to present an overview of contributions to the field of European property law published in 2017 and 2018. Once again, the aim is not to provide an in-depth critical review of individual works, but to offer a panoramic view of recent publications. This necessitates a somewhat general approach, allowing for only short descriptions and outlines of the books and articles presented. Grouped by subject matter, the brief remarks on each work are intended to give the reader a first orientation regarding current issues and debates, and to invite further exploration. Two remarkable trends emerge from the bird’s-eye view of recent publications. Firstly, property law – often considered a static and staid discipline – seems to be undergoing a “rejuvenating cure”. This is evident on the personnel level: a remarkable number of contributions come from young scholars at the outset of their careers as property law is an increasingly popular area for PhD and postgraduate dissertations. But it also holds true in terms of content: fresh angles, methods and approaches are brought to bear both on questions of traditional property law dogmatics and on new challenges. Secondly, the boundaries of property law are continuously opening up, going beyond the classic “law of things” to branch out into neighbouring disciplines while incorporating practice-oriented approaches and inter-disciplinary connections into dogmatic property law research. As many of the newly arising challenges to property law are of global importance, purely national angles of research are increasingly replaced by encompassing internationality.