Contract and Power: Ideologies, Inequalities, and Marginalisation in European Contract Law

This volume investigates how power shapes, distorts, and sometimes defines contractual relationships. Its central aim is to challenge the enduring legal fiction that parties meet as equals, revealing instead how power, be it economic, social, technological, institutional, or interpersonal, permeates negotiation, formation, performance, and enforcement. By uncovering the many ways in which contractual arrangements reflect and reproduce broader patterns of inequality and marginalisation, the book invites readers to rethink contract not as a neutral mechanism of private ordering, but as a field deeply embedded in social structures and political realities.

The authors collectively explore the multifaceted nature of power: how it emerges between individuals, within intimate relationships, across labour markets, and through digital infrastructures and algorithmic systems. Contributors examine bargaining imbalances, undue influence, duress, pay transparency, platform work, consumer vulnerability, technological obsolescence, and the discriminatory effects of automated decision-making. Others interrogate the deeper architecture of private law and show how its doctrines, categories, and organising concepts may obscure power, normalise domination, or shape social identities.

Together, the contributions trace a movement toward a more explicit recognition of unilateral decision-making and a growing body of norms that increasingly resemble a distinct ‘law of power’.

The volume is intended for scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and students of contract law, European private law, law and political economy, socio-legal studies, and technology regulation. It will also appeal to readers interested in inequality, social justice, digital governance, and the evolving role of private law in contemporary societies. By placing dynamics of power at the centre of analysis, the book equips its audience with new conceptual tools for understanding how contracts operate in practice and how legal institutions might better respond to the realities of asymmetry that shape everyday transactions.