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The rule‐of‐law‐backsliding in some Member States has subverted not only one of the EU fundamental values but also trust among national authorities when implementing European Arrest Warrants (EAW). However, when evaluating the execution of EAWs issued by countries experiencing rule‐of‐law crises, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) sought to preserve judicial cooperation and imposed a rather "top‐down" view on mutual trust among Member States. This approach seemingly disregards the (dis)trust which has emerged in the EU due to rule‐of‐law‐backsliding and fails to acknowledge the psycho‐sociological nature of trust. Drawing on the trust literature, the paper offers novel conceptual elements to rethink mutual trust in the EAW framework. Notably, it critically assesses some of the gaps in the CJEU's interpretation of mutual trust and advances suggestions to embed empirical considerations in the conceptualisation of this principle to bridge the gap between trust in practice and in principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union enshrines the right to asylum. Nonetheless, despite its 'constitutionalisation' within primary law, asylum remains a far too amorphous right, whose axiological potential has gone virtually unnoticed in the ongoing migratory crisis. The paper will argue that this is partly due to the fact that the Court of Justice on a few occasions has declined to clarify the scope of Article 18. The provision at issue therefore remains a pathological element that requires an adequate diagnosis on which accurate prognoses can be based. In an attempt to diagnose the right to asylum enshrined in Article 18 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, this paper will compare different hermeneutical approaches and reflect on the contextualisation of the mentioned provision through the lens of domestic and EU case law and in the light of the recent EU-Turkey Statement. The article will ultimately propose to interpret the EU asylum legislation as instrumental to the effective exercise of the right to asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine the relationship between EU law and the Italian legal order in light of the recent Italian Constitutional Court (ICC)'s jurisprudence attempting to redefine EU core principles. When fundamental rights are at stake, three assumptions are challenged: the determination of direct effect shall be a prerogative of the ECJ; EU directly effective provisions entail the disapplication of conflicting national law; judges have the discretion to refer preliminary references to the ECJ where a clarification on EU law is needed. The contribution argues that the judicial search for a balance between sovereignty and supranationality is undermined by the ICC's new resistance to the well‐established EU jurisprudence. In that respect, the paper posits that the ICC's activism is the result of an unjustified 'argumentative self‐restraint' of the ECJ vis‐à‐vis the evolution of EU foundational principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Fedon case-law of the European Court of Justice ( Court of Justice), which involved a claim for compensation by Fedon (an Italian producer of eyeglass cases) from the EU for the imposition of World Trade Organization ( WTO)-authorised retaliatory trade barriers by the USA following the failure by the EU to comply with an adverse ruling by the WTO regarding its import regime for bananas. As a result of the EU non-compliance, European banana distributors and some bananas producers benefited from WTO-illegal protection, at the expense of a set of EU exporters, including Fedon, that were hit by US countermeasures. Fedon contested the non-compliance by the EU before the Court of Justice and sought compensation. This paper assesses the ruling of the Court of Justice against Fedon and argues that the Court got it wrong, both in terms of legal principle and as a matter of legal technicalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principle of proportionality is at the cornerstone of EU law, and precisely of the case-law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In the law and economics literature, the general principles of law are commonly opposed to legal rules in terms of efficiency. On the one hand, the legal formalistic approach consists of apprehending the law as principled, whereby principles of law do not and should not encompass an efficiency rationale and should be self-sufficient. On the other hand, the legal nihilism denying the existence or relevance of the general principles of law favours legal rules that are said to incorporate an efficiency rationale. I intend to analyse the efficiency rationale of probably the most important general principles of EU law-the proportionality principle. In this paper, I shall assert that not only does the EU proportionality principle encapsulate an efficiency rationale, but most importantly, it has been interpreted by the ECJ as such-hence, I propose the representation of the principle of proportionality as a principle of economic efficiency. After having introduced the principle of proportionality (1), I shall decipher the proportionality principle both from a law and economics perspective, and from a comparative perspective (2). Then, I shall delve into the jurisprudence of the ECJ so that the judicial reasoning of the Court as this reasoning proves the relevance of the proposed representation (3). Finally, I conclude in light of the findings of this paper (4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European Studies used to be dominated by legal and political science approaches which hailed the progress of European integration and its reliance on law. The recent set of crises that struck the EU have highlighted fundamental problems in the ways and means by which European integration unfolds. The quasi-authoritarian emergency politics deployed in the euro crisis is a radical expression of the fading prevalence of democratic processes to accommodate economic and social diversity in the Union. As we argue in this paper, however, the mainstreams in both disciplines retain a largely affirmative and apologetic stance on the EU's post-democratic and extra-constitutional development. While political science contributions mostly content themselves with a revival of conventional integration theories and thus turn a blind eye to normatively critical aspects of European crisis governance, legal scholarship is in short supply of normatively convincing theoretical paradigms and thus aligns itself with the functionalist reasoning of the EU's Court of Justice. Yet, we also identify critical peripheries in both disciplines which intersect in their critical appraisal of the authoritarian tendencies that inhere in the crisis-ridden state of European integration. Their results curb the prevailing optimism and underline that the need for fundamental reorientations in both the theory and practice of European integration has become irrefutable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically engages with the European Regulatory Private Law thesis (ERPL). The main strength of ERPL is that it offers an entirely new perspective on European private law. However, as a complete theory of European private law, ERPL is too one-sided, both from a descriptive and from a normative point of view. With its strong focus on the private law locked up in regulatory silos for specific market sectors, it obscures the reality of the consumer acquis and its transformative force. A fuller picture would include the contours of a loosely coherent system of European private law that is currently emerging. The main pillars of that pragmatic system are (for now) the withdrawal rights, unfair term control, and remedies for nonconformity. Moreover, the contribution of European private law to access justice cannot be the only standard for its evaluation and critique; at least as important are interpersonal justice and democratic legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on an overarching project, focuses on the role of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) (also known as the Luxembourg Court) in shaping legal integration in Europe. The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the new legally binding nature of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the future EU's accession to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) bring significant changes to the fundamental rights discourse within the European Union. These developments allow the enhancement of human rights protection within the EU. Based on empirical data collected through interviews with the Court of Justice's judges and Advocates General and recent case-law, the paper offers original insights into the post-Lisbon era of regional integration and reflects on the impact of the Charter on the CJEU jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question: Who ought not to be excluded from the enjoyment of European citizenship rights? Recently, the Court of Justice has ruled that, in exceptional situations, the 'genuine enjoyment of the substance of rights attaching to European citizenship' can be invoked in order to also extend legal protection to specific categories of third country nationals. I will argue that the 'genuine enjoyment' formula is not only setting an innovative jurisdictional test concerning European citizenship rights, but that it is also highlighting how the traditional account of citizenship (from status to rights) can be conceptually reversed. This happens in threshold cases, where the tenability of the schema of distribution of rights, agreed within a political community, depends on the possibility to readjust the boundaries of political membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutional pluralism is a theory, or movement, or idea, for some perhaps even an ideal, about the relationship between the legal system of the European Union and those of its Member States. In this paper, Julio Baquero Cruz analyses its assumptions and implications in the light of historical experience and of the consequences it could have for the practice of law in Europe. To do so, constitutional pluralism is compared with the other main positions about that relationship: the national constitutional position and the position of Union law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general principle of equality in European law is often held to be inconsistently applied by the European Court of Justice ( ECJ) and insufficiently supported by methodology. Contrary to this assessment, this paper argues that there is substantial coherence and theoretical underpinning to the court's equality reasoning. First, it shows that the respective case-law can be subdivided into three groups, depending on the level of scrutiny applied. Second, it establishes that the prevailing accounts have difficulty in explaining the court's choice of scrutiny due to their limited selection of analytical parameters. Third, it concludes that comparative institutional analysis offers an alternative framework to make the ECJ's testing approaches in equality matters more intelligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of international law obligations that have binding force on the Union and/or its Member States is sharply increasing. This paper argues that in this light the well-functioning of the European Union ultimately depends on the protection of the principle of supremacy from law originating outside of the EU legal order. The supremacy of EU law is essential to ensuring that Member States cannot use national rules to justify derogation from EU law. As a matter of principle, international treaties concluded by the Member States rank at the level of ordinary national law within the European legal order and below all forms of European law (both primary and secondary). Article 351 TFEU exceptionally allows Member States to derogate from primary EU law in order to comply with obligations under anterior international agreements. It does not however allow a departure from the principle of supremacy that underlies the European legal order. In Kadi I, the Court of Justice of the European Union stated that Article 351 TFEU, while it permits derogation from primary law, may under no circumstances permit circumvention of the 'very foundations' of the EU legal order. This introduces an additional condition that all acts within the sphere of EU law need to comply with a form of 'super-supreme law'. It also strengthened the principle of supremacy and gave the Court of Justice the role of the guardian of the Union's 'foundations'. The Court of Justice acted on the necessity of defending the Union as a distinct legal order, retaining the autonomous interpretation of its own law, and ultimately ensuring that the Union can act as an independent actor on the international plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]