Standardization of standard contracts: fairness in EU energy exchanges

This chapter advances two claims. First, the EU has enacted a set of rules that affect the private order of organized markets and, in particular, the terms and conditions of standard contracts that daily frame thousands of global trades in exchanges located in the EU. Second, the EU explanatory justification for enactment of these rules is based on fairness. While EU law has advanced rules that, for example, standardize products offered in trading exchanges and reallocate risks among exchange members for misconduct, trading platform members have agreed upon transposing those rules into the text of standard agreements for trading. The phenomenon of mirroring the rules of EU law in the terms and conditions of standard agreements is what this chapter calls standardization of standard contracts. The standardization of standard contracts is then described as a twofold process: codification and intrusion.