The aim of the book is to investigate, on the more strictly legal side, the nature of the regulatory approach characterizing the EU system. The EU legal system - thanks to the multilevel dimension of European private law - has been marked by the use of new ways for governing its market integration, as complementary or alternative answers to legislative harmonisation realised implemented with institutional instruments. Family private law instruments such as tort or contract now appear only as a small part of many possible tools harnessed to the pursuit of allocative efficiency or distributive justice. Conversely, the range of arrangements of available public regulatory tools is extremely varied. The private law offers complementary remedies in individual situations through contract law, above all consumer law in the case of information problems, and at the same time as tort law assumes the effects of externalities suffered by third parties. Tort law may also give ex-post specific remedies, in case one party has been severely underprivileged. 'Social' regulation of Private, is correlated to distributive justice and to the insufficient resources of the part of the people excluded from acceding to essential services, to the greater bargaining power of the service provider, or to the inadequate financial and educational endowment of consumers to best measures their preferences.
