Organised by the Department of Law at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Economics and Business, the first Zagreb International Conference on the Law of Obligations will be held in Zagreb on the 12th and 13th of December 2019.

The conference welcomes proposals from scholars and practitioners in the field of the law of obligations.

Proposals should be submitted with an abstract not exceeding 500 words and an indication of the conference topic, using the registration form available at the conference website, no later than October 1, 2019.

Proposals should be in English or in Croatian and related to one of the topics of the conference. Authors may submit several proposals relating to different topics of the conference, but up to two proposals of the same author will be accepted for presentation in the conference, provided they relate to two different topics of the conference. Timely submitted proposals will be considered by the International Programme Committee which will choose the papers to be presented in the conference according to the criteria of excellence and originality of the research and the success in addressing the central topics of the conference.

The final decision on the acceptance of the proposals will be communicated to the authors by the 31st of October 2019. Authors whose proposals would be accepted for the presentation in the conference are expected to submit full papers no later than by the 15th of February 2020. The submitted papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed, and the selected papers will be published in the second half of 2020 in one of the several edited books anticipated as the outcome of the conference.

There is no registration fee for conference speakers, but the conference speakers are responsible for their own accommodation and travel arrangements.

Proposals of papers to be presented in the conference should be related to one of the following topics of the conference:

1. Croatian Law of Obligations in Comparative Law Context
2. New Codifications of the Law of Obligations in Central and Southeast Europe
3. The National Law of Obligations under the Influence of the EU Law
4. The Contemporary Challenges to the Law of Obligations
5. Towards the 40 years of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods: the CISG’s Autonomy and the National Sales Laws

Description of the conference topics:

1. Croatian Law of Obligations in Comparative Law Context
The papers relating to this topic of the conference should deal with the identification and analysis of the comparative law influences on the provisions of the Croatian Obligations Act of 2005 (OA), as well as the provisions of the earlier Obligations Act of 1978 (OA/1978) which were largely taken into the OA. The subject of the proposed paper should be a legal institute or a legal rule that was transplanted into OA, i.e. OA/1978, from a foreign legal system, while the analysis of that legal institute or legal rule should include its development in case law and legal science of the foreign legal system and the Croatian legal system. Of special interest to the conference are papers which deal with potential conflicts within the system of the law obligations resulting from the transfer of interrelated legal institutions and legal rules from different legal systems.

2. New Codifications of the Law of Obligations in Central and Southeast Europe
In the last two decades, the law of obligations in numerous Central and Southeast European countries was significantly modernised either through adoptions of the new civil codes or through the extensive reforms of the existing civil codes and obligation acts. In several Central and Southeast European countries, legislative reform of the law of obligations is underway or is being discussed. The proposals submitted under this topic of the conference should deal with the analysis of the results of the implemented or planned reforms of the law of obligations in Central and Southeast Europe. A subject of the paper may be the identification of the divergences of the new codifications from the earlier legal solutions and the analysis of the rationale behind these departures. Of special interest to the conference are papers which deal with nominally identical legal rules contained in different new codifications of the law of obligations in Central and Southeast Europe and with the analysis of their development in case law and legal science of the various legal systems of Central and Southeast Europe.

3. The National Law of Obligations under the Influence of the EU Law
The papers submitted within this topic of the conference should deal with the harmonisation of the national law of obligations with the acquis communautaire and with the interpretation and application of national law in the light of the objectives of the European Union’s sources of law. Of special interest to the conference are papers dealing with the repercussions that the implementation of the autonomous legal institutes of the EU law had on the system of the national law of obligations. Aside from shortcomings and difficulties of transposition of the EU directives into national law, the papers relating to this topic of the conference should examine the transposed provisions in several European national legal systems and their development in national case law and legal science. Of special interest to the conference are also papers dealing with the new EU directives on contract law aspects of the digital single market.

4. The Contemporary Challenges to the Law of Obligations
The papers submitted under this topic of the conference should deal with the obligations law aspects of new technologies and the contemporary social phenomena (e.g., smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, artificial intelligence, social networks, sharing economy, circle economy etc.). The papers should discuss whether the existing legal rules in national law provide the answers to the questions raised by the new technologies and social phenomena, and whether an appropriate modification of existing legal rules or a creation of an entirely new legal rules is needed to address the challenges imposed on the law of obligations by the new technologies and social phenomena.

5. Towards the 40 years of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods: the CISG’s Autonomy and the National Sales Laws
To mark the coming 40 years anniversary of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods of 1980 (CISG), a special topic of the conference is devoted to the analysis of the autonomous application of the CISG and of using the national laws to fill the gaps in the CISG. Of special interest are papers dealing with the influence of provisions of CISG on the legal rules contained in the national sources of contract law in Europe, in the EU legal sources, and in the case-law of the CISG contracting states.