For a number of decades now, services have been the motor on which modern economies run. In societies such as ours, new services and therefore new contracts emerge almost daily. However, at present neither at a national level nor at the level of the European Union, a coherent legal framework exists on the basis of which service contracts may be regarded. The lack of general rules on service contracts makes it hard to appreciate new forms of service contracts and to deal with them in a satisfactory way. The Law of Services has therefore become an inconsistent body of diverging and contract-specific rules. The author argues that there is need for a functional study of service relations and that the results of such a study may be used for the creation of a more uniform Law of Services.
European Review of Private Law