Maastricht European Private Law Institute - M-EPLI
Research institutes

Maastricht European Private Law Institute

The Maastricht European Private Law Institute (M-EPLI) conducts fundamental research in the field of European private law, covering not only the law of contract, property and tort, but also European procedural law, European legal theory and European legal history. Special focus is on exploring the consequences of Europeanisation and globalisation in the field of private law.

Research

M-EPLI conducts fundamental research in the field of European private law and related areas. Our belief is that in an age of Europeanisation and globalisation law should be studied as an international phenomenon. M-EPLI crosses borders between both national jurisdictions and the classical areas of law. A post-national legal science cannot take the distinction between public and private law as a starting point, but has to question the relevance of this distinction. Where useful, it also involves other disciplines (such as political science, economics and psychology).

M-EPLI’s research covers both the ‘integration’ and ‘interaction’ poles of the Faculty’s research programme (Integration of and interaction between legal orders). M-EPLI has three research lines 1. Convergence and divergence of private law, 2. Transnational legal method and 3.Changing conceptions of private law.

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M-EPLI’s research takes place
in the following pillars: 

1. Global Justice
2. Institutional Transformations
3. Globalising Markets 

 

News

  • Valerio is a YUFE Postdoctoral Researcher in Private Law at Tor Vergata University of Rome and he recently joined M-EPLI as a visiting researcher (January - May 2023). 

    He holds a PhD in Economics, Law and Institutions from Tor Vergata University of Rome.

    His research, supervised by dr Caroline Cauffman and dr Agustin Parise, will focus on Personalized Law and its relationship to the traditional categories of private law.

  • The faculty welcomes the excellent news that our colleague Anna Beckers has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for her research project on "CHAINLAW, Responsive Law for Global Value Chains". We would like to congratulate Anna Beckers!
     

  • After completing his Ph.D. on 31 March 2022, defending his dissertation on the theme of punitive damages from a comparative perspective at the University of Foggia Law School that was written under the guidance of his mentor, Professor Francesco Astone, he soon had the opportunity to start a post-doc researcher position in private law.

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  • Maria Breskaya recently joined M-EPLI as an external PhD student. Maria will carry out research on smart contracts and their relationship to the traditional legal notion of contract. The research is supervised by Professor Jan Smits and dr. Caroline Cauffman.

  • Mepli is happy to welcome two new PhD candidates: Wen-Ting Yang and Mingya Jiang.

  • M-EPLI is happy to welcome a new PhD researcher, Iris Xu. Iris studied the marketisation of Dutch higher education institutions in China for her MA Thesis. She will join M-EPLI as of 1 December 2022 to carry out research on the effectiveness and acceptability of personalised law in privacy protection for social media users in China, the EU, and the US. Coming from an interdisciplinary background, Iris received her Bachelor’s degree in anthropology and psychology from Lafayette College and her Master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam. Her research will incorporate interdisciplinary methods, including doctrinal legal research, experiments, and interviews, to comprehensively understand the potentiality of personalised law in privacy protection and to understand the boundary of it within the legal frameworks of different regions and from the perspectives of individuals.

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Meet our M-EPLI coordinators Marta and Caroline