With regard to third country goods, the EU Treaties had chosen a seemingly simple rule. Founded on the idea of a customs union, they decreed that – unlike in a free trade area – third country goods were simply assimilated to Member State goods once they had lawfully entered the common...

What does the neologism demoicracy mean? If democracy is the “government” of the “people”, canthere be a government of peoples? Are international organisations, like the United Nations, demoicracies; or should the United Kingdom, as a multi-nation state, be viewed as such? Within the...

Does the Community legal order constitute a closed ‘self-contained regime’ or will it be an ‘open system’? While founded on the basis of an international treaty, the European Community still has to determine – not unlike national legal orders – the effects of public international law...

This article brings classic constitutionalism to an analysis of delegated legislation in the European Union. To facilitate such a constitutional analysis, it starts with a comparative excursion introducing the judicial and political safeguards on executive legislation in American...

Protocol 36 to the Lisbon Treaty gives the UK the right to opt out en bloc of all the police and criminal justice measures adopted under the Treaty of Maastricht ahead of the date when the Court of Justice of the EU at Luxembourg will acquire jurisdiction in relation to them. The government is...

The euro area sovereign debt crisis was, in part, the result of the institutional and legal design of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The crisis highlighted the fact that, for EMU to be fully sustainable as a multilevel system of fiscal and economic governance, it should be able to...

Two of the most remarkable human rights cases decided by the European Court of Justice (ECJ or Court) in the past year concern the right to collective action. Both Laval and Viking involved conflicts between trade union action, forming part of the right to freedom of association, a right...

Across national borders, voices against the Lisbon Treaty have argued that ratification of this document would bring about undesirable changes in the nature of the European Union and the way it operates. These voices believe that there is nothing wrong with the Union at present (‘if it ain’t...