ADAPTATION IN EU PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL LAW

Adaptation or adjustment has to date received little general attention in EU private international law (EU PIL) despite this tool being of high importance in maintaining the coherence between the EU PIL system and national law. The Brussels Ia Regulation, the Succession Regulation and the Matri-monial / Registered Partnership Property Regimes Regulation explicitly provide for the tool of adaptation. Nevertheless, those provisions only deal with one certain category of that tool, what is termed transposition. In general, adaptation refers to the judge's discretion to deliberately deviate from a rule in an exceptional case in which two different national laws apply in juxtaposition and the combined application could lead to a contradictory result intended by neither of the two national systems. Adaptation diminishes or eliminates those contradictions. The judge's discretion to adapt national and EU rules implicates questions about the relationship between EU and Member State competence. The present analysis is the first to address this topic comprehensively. It develops a system to decrease contradictions between EU PIL and national law. As the EU PIL system is still only fragmentary, the analysis is twofold. First, the article analyses the necessity, requirements and means of adaptation in a case that is governed by two EU PIL rules. Second, the article analyses whether the outcome changes if the applicable law is determined by one EU PIL rule and one national PIL rule.