Non-State Law in Party Autonomy: a European Perspective

Non-state law refers to rules that do not belong to any sovereign state. Regardless of the increasing importance of non-state law in international transactions, the application of non-state law in court proceedings has not been clarified. In European Union, although the European Commission proposed that contractual parties should be allowed to choose 'principles and rules of the substantive law of contract recognised internationally or in the community', this proposal is not admitted in the final Rome I Regulation. This article considers the European development, discusses whether non-state law should be allowed as the governing law to a cross-border contract upon the parties' authorisation and provides suggestions for the appropriate treatment of non-state law in private international law.