The Jurisprudence of Process and European Transnational Private Law

The present chapter elaborates on the legal theory or jurisprudential foundations informing the notion of European transnational private law. Building upon the influential scholarship by Anu Bradford and Joanne Scott on the global reach of EU law, the chapter traces the widespread reliance in contemporary legal thought on proceduralisation parameters as a benchmark to foster regulatory quality and integrity to the relatively overlooked articulation of process-based legal theories during the 1950s. Through an interconnected reading of the seminal works of Hart and Sacks, McDougal and Lasswell, and Jessup, the chapter shows how – despite their different focuses and outlooks – these post-war authors offer a coherent, innovative, and appealing conception of law that encompasses the national, international, and transnational contexts, and that largely transcends the contemporary appeals to proceduralisation as a mere simile to standards of due process or natural justice. The chapter signifies this conception as the ‘jurisprudence of process’. After highlighting its relationship with the developments of European law and legal thought, the chapter deploys the jurisprudence of process as a framework to renovate contemporary studies on the global reach of EU law based on conceptual, analytical, and theoretical grounds. In this way, the chapter elaborates a renewed jurisprudential baseline for the prospective engagement with European transnational private law as a scholarly research agenda and as a matter of practical lawyering.