Contracts, Pigeonholes and Irish-Bulgarian connections. Cross-border litigation on property service charges: C-25/18 Kerr v Postnov and Postnova.

International private law (“IPL”) is heavily dependent on characterising legal relationships. The exercise of characterisation essentially requires a judge to decide in what IPL “pigeonhole” (or category) an action should be put.1 Each category then triggers the applicability of certain rules of adjudicatory jurisdiction or applicable law. The difficulty of this endeavour is that IPL categories are essentially private law concepts, which have a distinct meaning in each national legal system (e.g. contract, tort, right in rem etc.).2 In the IPL of the European Union (“EU”), a specific method prevails. Instead of preferring one national law concept over another, categories should be interpreted autonomously, that is, independently from their national counterparts, in order to achieve a uniform application of EU IPL throughout the Member States of the EU.3 The issues raised in the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) in Kerr v Postnov and Postnova are of direct relevance to autonomous interpretation in EU IPL...