Abstract Fairness appears as the guiding paradigm for regulating the digital economy. Yet its exact meaning has always remained dubious. The present article, which summarizes key insights of my doctoral thesis, ‘Fairness als Rechtsprinzip’, aims at filling this theoretical void by exploring to which extent fairness phenomena in competition-related economic law (understood as comprising unfair competition, antitrust, IP, trade secrecy, contract, anti-discrimination and data law) may be united under an overarching legal principle. Departing from the classic fairness-defining notion of ‘honest commercial practices’ enshrined in Art. 10bis para. 2 of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, the article overall suggests to (re-)construct the fairness principle as a normative bridge between law and society. Its task, viewed against the backdrop of a legal pluralist analysis of sociological disruptions in the globalized digital economy, is to normatively moderate the interplay of state and non-state rules of market order towards the common good from the perspective of the state.
Stefan Scheuerer (Tue,) studied this question.