The so-called commitment decision procedure, introduced into European competition law with Art. 9 of Regulation 1/2003, was meant to provide the Commission with the possibility to dispose of competition law cases by way of a kind of formal settlement, roughly analogous to the US consent decree....

The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg has been issuing judgments since 1954. It is beyond doubt that this body has, in these judgments, influenced the nature of European integration, indeed the nature of Europe itself, in a far reaching manner. Over the years, this Court has been called...

The use of one and the same word, i.e. Justice in the English or French language to render the two concepts of Gerechtigkeit when the issue is about equitability or fairness in social relations, and of Justiz when the issue is about the administration of justice often leads lawyers to overlook...

This paper is based on a lecture delivered during the Academy of European Law Summer School 2006. It provides an examination from a legal perspective of three current themes in the external relations of the European Union. First, the legal implications of the pillar structure for external...

The fragmented nature of national and international legal and dispute settlement regimes, and the formalistic nature of the customary international law rules on treaty interpretation and conflicts of laws, offer little guidance on how national and international judges should respond to the...

This contribution argues that concepts of social justice in European and international private law must remain consistent with the principles of justice underlying European and international public law. The contribution begins with a brief explanation of the diversity of conceptions of...

The notion of 'Administrative Authority' has several dimensions in EU law. From a functional perspective, administrative authority may be exercised according to three patterns: indirect administration by member states' governmental institutions - the typical Community pattern - direct...

This paper looks at the way in which the legal theory of the EU has evolved over the last half century. A major theme is the ongoing tension between continuity and change – between EU legal theory as continuous with national legal theory and EU legal theory as something new and sui generis....

My hypothesis, which I try to present in this paper can be broken down into three different affirmations: The ECJ is developing, on the basis of the acquis communautaire, a European Social Framework, not a fully-fledged European Social Model. The ECJ’s Social Model is based on access justice...

This working paper explores issues of security integration in a number of external policies of the European Union (EU), and looks at both security policies per se and the security rationale contained in other policy contexts. Following a twin-track approach of presenting both a legal and a...