Voyaging through standards, contracts, and codes: the transnational quest of European regulatory private law

Drawing upon the experience of travelling into foreign places as a guiding metaphor, this chapter argues that any analytical venture seeking to map the external effect of a domestic legal field entails a reflective facet that is usually expressed in the very terms and parameters that have been selected to orientate the examination. On this basis, the chapter proceeds in three steps. First, it situates the analytical endeavour of studying the external dimension of European regulatory private law (ED-ERPL) within the context of a perceived legitimation crisis of the EU and its legal order, to query about the overall meaning and significance of this endeavour. By interconnecting the various chapters in this volume with previous instantiations of the ERPL project and broader EU legal scholarship on the topic, second, it sketches the idea of a private administrative law as a conceptual framework that could productively integrate the understanding and assessment about how EU law is shaping the exercise of private regulatory authority through standards, contracts or codes. Finally, to emphasize the reflective facet regardingforthcoming ERPL voyages into foreign regulatory places, the chapter concludes by outlining some immanent analytical, methodological and normative challenges that are already looming on the horizon.