Social insurance is an established method of social protection in certain European Union (EU) member states and has been introduced more widely as a means of minimising the threats to social welfare expenditure from economic crisis and ageing populations. With the recent global financial crisis,...

This paper argues that the relationship between law and politics must be reconfigured within the European Union. Dissecting recent crises in Europe with reference to the three ‘fictitious’ commodities of Karl Polanyi, we find that law in Europe has contributed to de-legalisation,...

Martínez Sala and Bambaust have become the leading cases on free movement of persons in Community law. It has become standard to see both rulings as heralding a ‘civic’ turn of European integration, by expanding the personal scope of the freedom of personal movement from workers to...

The December judgments of the ECJ in Viking and Laval on the compatibility of national collective labour law with European prerogatives have caused a quite heated critical debate. This paper seeks to put this debate in constitutional perspectives. In its first part it reconstructs in legal...