In the process of restating the principles of European family law currently underway, it should be asked to what extent a common European system of child protection exists and what principles and values it comprises. In our view this system is multi-polar and has to be built from the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the instruments emanating from the Council of Europe, and especially from European Court of Human Rights case law. The article sets out and discusses the procedural and substantive principles derived from this case law. Although the UN Convention and ECtHR case law ­ applying the Rome Convention ­ approach child protection from opposing perspectives (in one case the affirming of children's rights, and in the other, the right to respect for family autonomy) a trend towards convergence and interaction between Conventions and their monitoring bodies can be discerned in recent ECtHR decisions. The final part of the article assesses this trend and the perspectives for the future.

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This paper offers an overlook on the institution of monarchy in Spain: history, organization, competences and legitimization. We emphasize the fact that with almost all competences formally linked to the King's role as Head of State, the monarch only carries out a 'formal act', whereas decisions rest with the Government and responsibility rests with the countersignatory of the King's acts. It introduces as well the question about the present and future role of the monarchy in European Union.

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Voluntary assumption of liability is an idea that naturally belongs to the province of the law of Contract. It is the obvious basis of contractual liability. It is not an obvious basis of liability in Tort or Delict, where traditionally obligations have been seen as imposed ex lege. This paper examines recent developments in the English law of negligence that have placed this idea at the centre of tortious liability, analyses this concept and considers the implications of these developments for the future of both Tort and Contract.

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The article investigates Italian civil Courts case-law on asbestos damages, focusing mainly on the issues of causation and fault. The diseases caused by asbestos exposure are often multifactorial diseases, to which the test of condition sine qua non cannot be applied to ascertain causation. The analysis of Italian case-law reveals a lack of uniformity in the criteria adopted to affirm the causation, contrasted by the uniformity of the criteria used to held the fault of the defendants. Such situation generates uncertainty in the protection of the rights of both the petitioners and the defendants. The lack of homogeneity in the criteria applied to establish the existence of causation is not exclusive of asbestos compensation cases, but is a constant characteristic of Italian civil case law, only lately reversed. Lastly, the author suggests some criteria that could be applied to ascertain causation in asbestos cases and other multifactorial diseases.

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This article aims to examine the condition of children in contemporary society and concerns their specific position of consumers. In this perspective, the analysis of the relations between minors and market joins juridical, sociological and philosophical issues and furthermore it is related also to the transformations of childhood in modern society (through the shift, for children, from a dimension of "incapable" persons to another that portrays them as autonomous and competent beings). The fil rouge of this research consists in examining the figure of the child consumer through an analysis of the state of the art of the juridical forms of protection, but also in a de iure condendo approach, considering the new rights and needs of children and the different models of regulations of their status and specific condition. In the background, there is the doctrinal debate concerning the position of minors in private law, their capacity to act beyond their legal incapacity (for example for the necessaries acts) and the problem to evaluate the relevance of their consent (and their ­if any­ contractual liability) also in order to protect third parties who have contractual relationships with them.

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The model rules in the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR), as any other body of legal rules, in force or simply proposed, naturally have the intention of affecting, in the desired direction, the behavior of the relevant parties subject to them. Thus, it seems, at least prima facie, wise to consider the tools in our possession in order to get some estimate of how the latter would likely respond to the rules. In recent years, social scientists in several disciplines (economics and psychology primarily) have studied human interaction in contracting and similar environments. They have studied such types of behavior both in laboratory settings, but also in real-world markets using rigorous empirical techniques. In this respect, the model rules in the DCFR look somewhat lacking in terms of the interest in the existing empirical knowledge of its subject matter. The main empirical source of information for the DCFR seems to be comparative legal analyses of EU Law and the Laws of European countries. This is indeed useful, but in order to understand the potential effects that the legal rules may have on the behavior of contracting parties, and, eventually, on the markets that link them, one should not disregard the amount of empirical knowledge that has been accumulated in recent years on how real people interact in a variety of contractual settings. This importance of empirical knowledge for informed policy-making and for the design of legal rules does not imply that there is an Iron Law of empirical regularity, or that our current level of empirical understanding is perfect and final. It is undeniable that there is still much to learn empirically about contracting behavior. But if we take seriously ­as I strongly believe we should- the impact of Contract Law on social welfare, empirical studies of contracting behavior, both in consumer markets and in firm-to-firm interaction, should carry some weight to assess legal solutions in Contract Law, and to craft them in an informed way.

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This paper aims at taking a critical look at the current state of English law on liability for contractual negotiations 1 , illustrating the extent to which English law is substantially different than other European legal systems in this respect, and also the extent to which this contrasts with current projects or existing texts of European or International harmonization of Contract law, namely, the EU Commission's Common Frame of Reference (CFR) 2 , the Principles of European Contract Law (PECL), the UNIDROIT Principles of Contract law and the UN Convention on the Law of International Sales of Goods (CISG). A very important basic distinction must be made between the case where no Contract results from contractual negotiations and the case where the contractual negotiations result in the formation of a prima facie valid agreement between the parties, or an agreement that is avoided. This paper will concentrate on the former case, which is more interesting as English law is this case still not settled, after a very brief look at the law applicable in the two latter cases.

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Comments on the Spanish Constitutional Court's Judgment 235/2007, November 7th

The Spanish Criminal Code of 1995 criminalized the dissemination by any means of ideas and doctrines denying or justifying genocide. Recently, the Spanish Constitutional Court, prompted by a referral of the Barcelona Court of Appeals, ruled in Judgment 235/2007, November 17th on the compatibility of this crime with the freedom of speech clause of the Spanish Constitution in the setting of the prosecution of a neo-Nazi activist and owner of a shop in the business of selling and distributing books, tracts and leaflets in many of them the Holocaust was, as a historical fact, denied, trivialized or justified. This article, on occasion of the Constitutional Court's Judgment, focuses on the grounds that justify analyzing the intersections between genocide denial and freedom of speech and seeks for explanations to the majority's ruling according to which simple denials of genocide fall under the umbrella of freedom of speech and only positive value statements, that is to say, utterances extolling genocide or minimizing or trivializing its consequences might be punished.

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