Subsidiarity and the New Frontiers of Freedom of Contract

The principle of subsidiarity is a suitable basis for legitimating a ruling that contracts concluded in place of public acts are binding. In this way, freedom of contract extends to new forms, namely: “contracts substitutive of administrative measures”; “contracts as an alternative to judicial settlements”; and “contracts as sources of legal rules”. This extension of the freedom of contract runs counter to theories predicting the “death of contract” and the “fall of freedom of contract”. This paper aims to reconstruct the systematic framework of these legal reasonings.