The new economic governance of the Eurozone has heavily impacted on social rights, in particular in the most indebted Member States. This chapter reconstructs the logic behind the attack upon social rights by adopting a materialist approach (i.e., critique of the political economy) and it...

This paper explores the democratic promise of ‘democratic governance' and finds it to be a lie. With a particular emphasis on how the economic system has cut itself adrift from legal regulation and, in the process, re-configured its relationship to the law under the sign of “governance”,...

The paper discusses how we might understand solidarity as subtending the institutionalisation of social rights in a way that carries productive tension into the constitutional thinking of social protection. I argue that writing solidarity into social rights constitutionalism is the...

This collective paper discusses the many faceted entanglements of knowledge, power and law within, and, even more so, beyond the state. Several eminent scholars in the field offer their view on how the knowledge-power-law nexus should be framed, and what its most salient problems are. In the...

This article examines and assesses virtues and limits of the contribution of political constitutionalism to the question of reasoning about rights. In the first section, the role of legislatures in deciding about rights is examined and compared to judicial reasoning. The main tenets of the...

This chapter reviews the major trends of pluralism in EU studies and assesses them against their pluralist credentials. The main problem affecting these pluralist approaches is that, contrary to their intentions, they tend to close politics down

The Euro Crisis has granted a new role to the European Central Bank (ECB) on top of the previous one: from regulator of monetary policy in the Eurozone to active participant in the governance of the common currency area. In light of the relevance of the latter role, some of the decisions of the...

The article adopts the approach of the cultural study of law as developed mostly (but not exclusively) by Paul Kahn in order to explain the potential for charisma of contemporary central banks. The analysis focuses on the European Central Bank (ECB) and on Draghi's famous statement: 'we will do...

This paper has been organised in six sections. The first one delineates the material methodology of studying the constitutional order by juxtaposing it to other ‘political’ approaches and it offers a reconstruction of the two legal theories from which it draws its inspiration. Then, the...