The idea of an “economic constitution” was developed by a group of German economists and lawyers in the Weimar Republic which sought a “third - the ordo-liberal - way” between laissez-faire liberalism and socialist politics. Ordo-liberalism survived the Third Reich untainted. In the 50s,...

Against a backdrop of rapidly evolving crisis management in the European financial and sovereign debt crisis this essay aims both to explore and to re-consider the role of law in the EU integration process: What did law accomplish? Where did it fail? What is law going to endure? What kind of...

The European Union is in troubled waters. Its original reliance on law as the object and agent of the integration project and on the “economic constitution” which the EMU, as accomplished by the Treaty of Maastricht, were expected to complete have proven to be unsustainable. Following the...

This paper discusses the fundamental tensions between economic globalisation and democratic politics in the field of international trade. New bilateral and regional trade agreements increasingly incorporate other “trade-related” policy areas and threaten to constrain state action and...

This chapter argues that the one-sidedness of the integration process, its promotion of ever deeper economic integration, has contributed to the legitimacy crisis with which the EU is confronted at present. This crisis has, in the course of the efforts to tame the financial crisis through...

This working paper collects a series of personal reflections on the outcome of the Brexit referendum. The essays do not engage with the legal and constitutional issues that arise from this event – these aspects have received comment elsewhere. Rather, the editor has solicited personal...

This paper discusses the fundamental tensions between economic globalization and democratic politics in the field of international trade governance. The move towards mega-regional trade agreements, as heralded by the controversies over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)...

The ‘European Social Model', ill-defined and under-theorised as it may be, is widely perceived as the great looser in the political and institutional re-configuration of the European integration project which we have witnessed under the impact of the financial crisis. The state of social...