Martijn Hesselink proposes a ‘Progressive code of European Private Law’, which would seek to tame the ‘legal steroids’ that private law modules and savvy crafting by well-paid lawyers currently offer to to global capitalism. The present comment engages with one of the core characters of the proposed code, namely that it should ‘consist of fundamental principles (not detailed rules)’. Rather than taking up the impossible task of suggesting (or speculating) what the principles should be, the paper aims to further operationalise certain aspects of what they should – or should not – do. To this aim, the role of principles is assessed in relation to attempts to ‘code for the 99 per cent’. Hence, the paper revisits certain mechanisms of so-called weaker party protection or social law through Katharina Pistor’s coding analytics (priority, durability, universality, convertibility). Private law principles and their legacy are part of the resistance, or backlash, against social coding. The paper concludes that a code of principles that aims to be progressive in the sense Hesselink highlights should consider at least two requirements: first, principles should be expressly formulated in such a way that they do not stand in the way of progressive detailed rules; second, they need to broaden the private legal imagination. It is on this account that ‘any amount of regulatory private law could not achieve what a (constitutionalised) code of private law principles could accomplish’.

In the People's Republic of China, the 2015 (revised) Higher Education Law provides that citizens enjoy the right to receive higher education. That legal ideal, however, is not easy to implement in practice. One important issue in higher education is the extent to which in law and in practice the educational rights and interests of students with disabilities are realized. In anticipation of difficulties, the same law specifically requires Chinese higher education institutions to enrol disabled students who meet the relevant admission qualifications and it explicitly prohibits rejection on grounds of disability. Admission standards and processes, however, remain a problem, as do social attitudes to disability, and other difficulties persist in securing the rights and interests of disabled persons in higher education. The complications that arise remain significantly under researched and are not explicitly addressed in the Higher Education Law. Proposals for reform are not likely to succeed without substantial changes in societal and governmental attitudes.