Search

Providing perspectives from different fields of study such as public policy and politics as well as legal analysis, this book highlights the rule of law as a fundamental value of the European Union, and examines how this is implemented throughout the Member States. The Rule of Law Under Threat explores empirical evidence and quantitative methods for studying the dynamics of this imperative legal principle in interdisciplinary research. Internationally renowned experts consider the rule of law in the context of previous and future accessions to the EU in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, with particular focus on Hungary as one of the most recent and notorious cases of rule of law deficits in the EU. Finally, the book analyses the legal and political toolbox that the EU has at its disposal to counter the erosion of rule of law standards, including the Article 7 procedure, as well as strategies which recognise specific national discourses on and perceptions of the rule of law. Students and scholars in constitutional and administrative law, European law, law and politics, and legal history will benefit from this book's multidisciplinary approach to the rule of law. It is also an essential resource for practitioners and decision-makers in EU nations as well as candidate countries.

The objective of European integration serves as an ideal of the legal order of the European Union and invites reconsideration of law's conceptual features. This book critically assesses the legal order of the European Union, focusing on the operative aspects of the Union constitution with particular reference to the institutional practices of the Court of Justice in expressing the values underlying this constitution. Drawing together positivist and non-positivist accounts within an institutional understanding of law, Timothy Moorhead breaks new ground in applying a range of analytic jurisprudential perspectives to the Union legal order, and in employing the theoretical resources provided by the Union to model a revised conceptual viewpoint concerning legal order generally. In offering this conceptual approach, Moorhead emphasises the flexibility inherent in law's institutional character as the basis for a theoretical rationalisation of the Union legal order. This book will be of great use and interest to scholars and students of European Union Law, Jurisprudence and European Constitutionalism.