The EU's private law in the regulated sectors: competitive market handmaiden or institutional platform?

The article contests the claim that the content and institutions of European Union private law are narrowly circumscribed by a market rationality. While such a claim tracks broader critical reflections on EU functional legal integration, it tends to obscure the underlying transformative pressures on private law and regulation, as well as the role that EU law and governance play in coping with such pressures. To offer a number of counter-narratives about the construction of EU private law, the article draws on examples from the regulated sectors such as electronic communications and energy to reveal their experimentalist features. These examples suggest that European private law is constructed through a process of error-corrections, which allows for mutual adjustment of instruments and hybridisation of EU-level and local policy goals