This book explains how the OECDs Product Market Regulation (PMR) Indicators treat civil law notaries. It explains why applying a pro-competition metric designed for goods and private services to German notaries who are independent holders of a public office and integral to the preventive administration of justice produces distorted and policymisleading results. At its core, the book shows that civil law notaries are not market actors in the conventional sense. In Germany, notaries exercise statedelegated functions, create enforceable public deeds, safeguard the reliability of land and commercial registers, combat money laundering, and guarantee universal, affordable access to legal certainty under a fixed, socially balanced fee schedule. The analysis reconstructs the PMR methodology and demonstrates its misfit for services whose quality is defined by independence, impartiality, and legal reliability qualities that cannot be reduced to price/quantity proxies or ranked alongside architects, estate agents, or accountants. The book is intended for policymakers, regulators, competition economists, legal scholars, ministries of justice, bar and notarial bodies, and graduate students in law and public policy.
Chapter 1 Introduction.
Chapter 2 Economic Theory of Regulation.-
Chapter 3 Description of the OECD's Product Market Regulation Indicators.-
Chapter 4 General Normative Framework for Civil Law Notaries.
Chapter 5
The Methodological Problems of Applying the PMR Indicators to Notarial
Services in Germany.
Chapter 6 Summary.
Chapter 7 Solution.
About the Authors: Prof. Dr. rer. pol. Franz W. Peren, Ph.D., is a professor of business administration specializing in quantitative methods. He has been teaching business mathematics, business statistics, and quantitative methods in planning, taxation, and controlling within operational and strategic management since 1993, mainly at German universities of applied sciences. He has also taught and conducted research as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC, Canada, and at Columbia University in New York City, USA.
Prof. Dr. Dirk Uwer, LL.M. , Mag.rer.publ., is a partner at the law firm Hengeler Mueller. He specializes in public commercial law, compliance and white-collar criminal law, as well as notarial and professional-regulatory matters. As a member of the Legislative Assembly (Satzungsversammlung) of the German Federal Bar as well as of the Professional Law Committee and the European Committee of the German Bar Association, he also deals intensively with the law governing the legal profession and the professional laws of other liberal professions. He advises clients from a wide range of business sectors on the law of money laundering prevention. In his areas of expertise, Dirk Uwer is committed to, and enthusiastic about, academic research and teaching and, as the author of some 150 publications, also a prolific writer. In 2016, he was appointed honorary professor of law.
Dr. Manuel Joseph, LL.M. (Virginia), is an attorney at Hengeler Mueller focusing on public commercial and regulatory law. He pursued his doctoral research at the University of Münster and was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York City, which deepened his comparative and international perspective on regulatory matters. During his LL.M. studies at the University of Virginia, he focused, among other areas, on the economic theory of law. His practice spans complex regulatory frameworks and engagement with public authorities and is complemented by experience in notarial and professionalregulatory matters.
