Good afternoon, everybody.

It's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Hans McGraths, who recently retired from the

European University in Florence, an institution that is a major centre of legal research and is very fortunately

going to continue as part of the UK's forward relationships with Europe as a major place to go. And indeed, many students from here are now in Florence enjoying themselves up on the hills

among the olive trees and probably much warmer weather than we're getting.

He's going to talk to us today about the European Union as a regulator of private law.

He's a professor of economic law, but has many more areas to his boat, as you will discover.

And he's offering us different paradigms of how to look at what the European Union does in relation to private law.

Yes.

Great pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.

Perhaps as an introduction to better understand the background of what I'm presenting.

So at the EUI, for most of the time, most of the years that I spent there, I was very much

focusing on to understand how the EU is transforming private law inside the EU for the member

states.

So I was looking into all these sorts of regulation that the EU has adopted and how it

affected the member states.

That was a big project, and last year I published a book here,

I was Cambridge University Press.

If you have nothing to do, then you can go through the 400 pages or so.

Good.

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