Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (42)
- Part of a Book (28)
- Editorship book (4)
- Working Paper (4)
- Book (3)
- Review (1)
Language
- English (81)
- Multiple languages (1)
Keywords
- Social policy (2)
- Academic discourse (1)
- Accountability (1)
- Charles Sabel (1)
- Constitutional Dialogue (1)
- Constitutional balance (1)
- Discrimination (1)
- EC law (1)
- EU Competence (1)
- EU Economic Governance (1)
This book delves into the rationale, components of, and responses to accusations of judicial activism at the European Court of Justice.
Detailed chapters from academics, practitioners and stakeholders bring diverse perspectives on a range of factors – from access rules to institutional design and to substantive functions – influencing the European Court’s political role. Each of the contributing authors invites the reader to approach the debate on the role of the Court in terms of a constantly evolving set of interactions between the EU judiciary, the European and national political spheres, as well as a multitude of other actors vested in competing legitimacy claims. The book questions the political role of the Court as much as it stresses the opportunities – and corresponding responsibilities – that the Court’s case law offers to independent observers, political institutions and civil society organisations.
Judicial Activism at the European Court of Justice will appeal to researchers and graduate students as well as to EU and national officials.
This book delves into the rationale, components of, and responses to accusations of judicial activism at the European Court of Justice. Detailed chapters from academics, practitioners and stakeholders bring diverse perspectives on a range of factors – from access rules to institutional design and to substantive functions – influencing the European Court’s political role. Each of the contributing authors invites the reader to approach the debate on the role of the Court in terms of a constantly evolving set of interactions between the EU judiciary, the European and national political spheres, as well as a multitude of other actors vested in competing legitimacy claims. The book questions the political role of the Court as much as it stresses the opportunities – and corresponding responsibilities – that the Court’s case law offers to independent observers, political institutions and civil society organisations.
The failure of individual and institutional remedies to ensure the effective enforcement of European Union (EU) law has increasingly focused attention on collective routes to ensuring adherance to EU policies and rights. How comprehensive, however, should collective remedies under EU law be? This introductory article - as well as the other articles of this volume - explores the feasibility of a horizontal approach to the collective enforcement of EU law. While the hope for such an approach has been bolstered by the engagement of the EU institutions, the Commission's most recent 2013 Recommendation fails to significantly advance the development of collective remedies at EU level. The article will conclude by exploring some further, non-legislative, alternatives to furthering the collective enforcement of EU law.
This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro-crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self-determination. In the context of the EU, this requirement is met through the idea of constitutional balance, with ‘substantive’, ‘institutional’ and ‘spatial’ dimensions. Analysing reforms to EU law and institutional structure in the wake of the crisis – such as the establishment of the ESM, the growing influence of the European Council and the creation of a stand-alone Fiscal Compact – it is argued that recent reforms are likely to have a lasting impact on the ability of the EU to mediate conflicting interests in all three areas. By undermining its constitutional balance, the response to the crisis is likely to dampen the long-term stability and legitimacy of the EU project.
Constitutional Dialogue between Courts and Legislatures in the European Union: Prospects and Limits
(2013)
The concept of 'constitutional dialogue' has become a focal point of US and Canadian public law scholarship. This concept sees judicial review not as a check on majority preferences but instead as part of a deliberation between the legislative and judicial branches over how constitutional commitments and general political objectives can be integrated. This article will explore the prospects and limits of developing the dialogue concept in the context of the present-day European Union (EU). The article will present a two-part argument: While the EU's political and legal diversity make the idea of a 'shared responsibility' for constitutional interpretation between judges and policy-makers normatively attractive, the existing institutional structure of the Union limits the incentives necessary for legal and political actors to constitutionally engage.
With contributions from scholars in a range of different disciplines, this book reflects upon the achievements and failures to date of integration efforts aimed at Europe's Romani populations. The snapshots provided examine a variety of integration efforts at different levels and involving a range of institutional actors. In doing so, they offer a comprehensive introduction to aspects of human rights and integration within the European Union as well as crucial insights as to the current state of affairs in Europe as policy makers reflect on the current direction of initiatives to combat Romani exclusion.(About the Book)
While scholarly writing has dealt with the role of law in the process of European integration, so far it has shed little light on the lawyers and communities of lawyers involved in that process. Law has been one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of the European integration process, and EU law has become a well-established academic discipline, with the emergence more recently of an impressive body of legal and political science literature on 'European law in context'. Yet this field has been dominated by an essentially judicial narrative, focused on the role of the European courts, underestimating in the process the multifaceted roles lawyers and law play in the EU polity, notably the roles they play beyond the litigation arena. This volume seeks to promote a deeper understanding of European law as a social and political phenomenon, presenting a more complete view of the European legal field by looking beyond the courts, and at the same time broadening the scholarly horizon by exploring the ways in which European law is actually made. To do this it describes the roles of the great variety of actors who stand behind legal norms and decisions, bringing together perspectives from various disciplines (law, political science, political sociology and history), to offer a global multi-disciplinary reassessment of the role of 'law' and 'lawyers' in the European integration process. (About the Book)
This book delves into the rationale, components of, and responses to accusations of judicial activism at the European Court of Justice.
Detailed chapters from academics, practitioners and stakeholders bring diverse perspectives on a range of factors – from access rules to institutional design and to substantive functions – influencing the European Court’s political role. Each of the contributing authors invites the reader to approach the debate on the role of the Court in terms of a constantly evolving set of interactions between the EU judiciary, the European and national political spheres, as well as a multitude of other actors vested in competing legitimacy claims. The book questions the political role of the Court as much as it stresses the opportunities – and corresponding responsibilities – that the Court’s case law offers to independent observers, political institutions and civil society organisations.
Judicial Activism at the European Court of Justice will appeal to researchers and graduate students as well as to EU and national officials.
(About the Book)
This book delves into the rationale, components of, and responses to accusations of judicial activism at the European Court of Justice.
Detailed chapters from academics, practitioners and stakeholders bring diverse perspectives on a range of factors – from access rules to institutional design and to substantive functions – influencing the European Court’s political role. Each of the contributing authors invites the reader to approach the debate on the role of the Court in terms of a constantly evolving set of interactions between the EU judiciary, the European and national political spheres, as well as a multitude of other actors vested in competing legitimacy claims. The book questions the political role of the Court as much as it stresses the opportunities – and corresponding responsibilities – that the Court’s case law offers to independent observers, political institutions and civil society organisations.
Judicial Activism at the European Court of Justice will appeal to researchers and graduate students as well as to EU and national officials.
(About the Book)
The last 10 years of EU integration has seen a “rights revolution”, at least in so far as fundamental rights are increasingly the register through which legal conflicts in the EU are articulated. But how are EU fundamental rights enforced in a legal order where enforcement relies upon the navigation of multiple institutions and levels of law? This article will seek to clarify this question, using the example of equality law to explore the various remedies available under EU law to enforce EU fundamental rights, and analysing their various strengths and weaknesses. The article will argue that while EU law has considerably enhanced the possibilities for individuals and groups to challenge breaches of fundamental rights to equality, the system of remedies provided by EU law has serious weaknesses. First, the autonomy provided by EU law for domestic orders to develop their own remedies and rules of access creates significant discrepancies in enforcing fundamental rights across the Member States. Secondly, the enforcement of EU equality law remains primarily based on individual litigation both leaving “gaps” in protection for vulnerable groups and making it difficult to address “systemic” problems of discrimination. The EU’s “rights revolution” both provides legal and political opportunities for social actors while also challenging the EU’s existing system of judicial remedies.
This article analyses the evolving relationship in the EU between “new governance” methods and law, arguing that this relationship can be seen in three distinct “waves” of activity. While the last few years have seen a relative decline in the level of academic and institutional interest in new governance processes, recent developments, such as the renewal of the Lisbon “2020” strategy, and accusations of “judicial activism” laid at the door of the European Courts, suggest a renewed role for new governance mechanisms. The article will argue for a “third wave” of governance research based on interaction between the policy elaborating function of new governance and the procedural role of the European Courts in providing due process and other rights. This emerging third wave — and its limits — suggest an emerging research agenda for EU lawyers and political scientists based not on the opposition, but the complementarity, of new governance and legal institutions.
In the summer of 2010, French authorities organized the systematic dismantling of illegal Roma settlements. This resulted in the departure of a large number of Roma-EU citizens from France, as well as a significant dispute between France and the European Commission. While the dispute raises a number of issues of substantive EU law, it also illustrates some important strengths and weaknesses in the system of fundamental rights protection in EU law. This article takes these events as a test case to illustrate that tackling complex problems of human rights protection in the EU requires a hybrid approach in which individual and institutional enforcement mechanisms are complemented by a third level of collective vigilance. While ever since Van Gend & Loos the EU has built a comprehensive system of individual and institutional remedies for the enforcement of EU law, social and political factors may limit their usefulness for vulnerable minorities. The vigilance of collective actors such as networks, NGOs, trade unions and agencies may offer a useful additional layer of protection where they are well-integrated within the classic system of remedies for fundamental rights protection in the EU.
Transforming into what?: New Governance in the EU and the “Managerial Sensibility” in Modern Law
(2010)
As part of his account of "fragmentation" in international law, Martti Koskenniemi has described the advance of a "managerial sensibility" in modern law. This sensibility incorporates two claims—first, the increasing differentiation of international rules; and second, a tendency to see law not as an end in itself, but as a managerial technique. It is not difficult to apply both tenets of managerialism to the practice of "new governance." On the one hand, methods like the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) attest to a feeling that law is too distanced a register to capture the kinds of detailed intervention that EU regulation requires, leading to differentiation between policy fields. On the other hand, this has been carried out in order to "specialize," allowing overall targets to be reached through narrow administrative elites. Managerialism is present in processes like the OMC both as a differentiation of legal procedures, and as a view of rules as "flexible" in service of the evolving goals and self-image of a particular policy community. While this managerial ethos would seem suitable for a particular vision of the EU polity—the depoliticized regulatory state—it is increasingly problematic. As the principle vehicle for the delivery of the Lisbon strategy, determining the indicators and objectives of the OMC is a far from technical task. What appears and has been marketed as a "micro-politics" of expert based benchmarking has the potential to invoke larger strategic questions for the EU while simultaneously placing them out of public view. In response, new avenues for politicizing new governance or for opening its principle procedures and indicators up to critical evaluation and scrutiny (including to a non-expert public) may be needed. While this is no easy task, this Article will explore two modest proposals—first, the scrutiny role of the European Parliament, and second, the development of the European Ombudsman as an avenue to provide non-judicial means for addressing problems of intransparency and accountability in EU governance. In both cases, while a full politicization of the method may be difficult, a partial strategy may be an important first step in reconciling new governance procedures with the democratic values upon which the Treaties of the EU claim to be based.
The development of the open method of co-ordination from the extraordinary Lisbon European Council in 2000 has been considered by many academic and institutional commentators as a break-through for Social Europe. Yet what kind of breakthrough is it? While many "OMC optimists" have seen its development as providing a new space for social policy outside a restrictive Treaty structure, others have pointed to the integration of the OMC within the Lisbon Strategy as evidencing a new set of economic constraints on the welfare state's development. This paper will argue that there is a deep ambiguity within the OMC's social role; while on the one hand, it can be seen as "colonising" - entering national social institutions ever further into an EU framework dominated by market actors - on the other hand, it can be posited as "reflexive", as encouraging both competing social and economic discourses, and inter-dependent national polities, to reflect upon the objectives of each other.