Basic Concepts of European Private Law

The purpose of this paper is to develop a small set of basic legal concepts in terms of which the private law of European legal systems can be expressed. The concepts should not reflect the law of any particular system, and should for this reason be suitable as a tertium comparationis for comparative law. The paper proposes for this purpose the set consisting of the concepts 'duty' and 'competence', and illustrates the possibilities offered by this small set by analyzing the concepts of right in rem, right in personam legal act, and immunity in terms of it. Moreover, it contains a comparison of the proposed set to the set of basic concepts proposed by Hohfeld. The major difference is that the Hohfeldian concepts are relational (e.g. X has a duty towards Y to do Z), while the set proposed in this paper is not (e.g. X has a duty to do Z). It is argued that the non- relational concepts are to be preferred to the Hohfeldian set of relational concepts.