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This article examines what difference – if any – the renewed EU Better Regulation Agenda has made for the EU Commission in terms of its own accountability and policy outcomes. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of the EU elections and the presidency of the EU Commission –, the Juncker Commission emerged as the most political yet. To shrug off the label of technocratic institution – historically insulated from citizens’ preferences –, the new Commission asked EU citizens to judge its operation by its ability ‘to deliver solutions to the big issues that cannot be addressed by the Member States alone’. By embracing such a panem et circenses approach to EU democracy – as such not too dissimilar from the Santer’s and Barroso’s previous administrations – the Juncker Commission raised new expectations. This is true not only in terms of output legitimacy – which was meant to become the privileged benchmark against which to measure the Commission’s success –, but also in terms of its own democratic and political accountability vis-à-vis EU citizens. Indeed, although unintelligible to the many, the Spitzenkandidaten logic entails that EU citizens contributed for the first time with their vote to shape the political orientation of this Commission and – as a result – could hold it accountable. While the very notion of political accountability is foreign to the EU constitutional setting – as citizens don’t have the possibility to replace the Commission if this does not meet their hopes –, the Juncker Commission has strived to frame its mandate as if such an oversight existed. This article concludes that at the very same time the Juncker Commission has been striving to develop its own, autonomous democratic credentials, its choice to embrace a set of well-defined institutional mechanisms that reward expert judgment over political adjudication appears at odds with its newly-acquired political nature.

To resolve conflicts among norms, various nonmonotonic formalisms can be used to perform prioritized normative reasoning. Meanwhile, formal argumentation provides a way to represent nonmonotonic logics. In this paper, we propose a representation of prioritized normative reasoning by argumentation. Using hierarchical abstract normative systems, we define three kinds of prioritized normative reasoning approaches, called Greedy, Reduction, and Optimization. Then, after formulating an argumentation theory for a hierarchical abstract normative system, we show that for a totally ordered hierarchical abstract normative system, Greedy and Reduction can be represented in argumentation by applying the weakest link and the last link principles respectively, and Optimization can be represented by introducing additional defeats capturing the idea that for each argument that contains a norm not belonging to the maximal obeyable set then this argument should be rejected., Accepted by the Journal of Logic and Computation on November 2nd, 2017

This Memorandum to the European Commission presents our professional opinion on the legal and ethical issues arising from the appointment of the former President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso as non-executive chairman and director of Goldman Sachs. We identify a number of flaws of the Opinion of the Ad Hoc Ethical Committee which considered the issue and offer our own analysis of applicable law and the action the Commission is required to take. In our view, the Opinion represents a case of maladministration, on the ground of which it should have been set aside by the Commission in unequivocal terms. On our own analysis, Mr. Barroso’s acceptance of his new appointment was ethically inappropriate and, therefore, a violation of TFEU. Further we argue that the Commission has powers to take remedial action and is legally obliged to act to enforce the EU law and to protect the interests of the EU and its reputation. We show that, contrary to most comments in the media, the expiry of the eighteen months ‘cooling-off’ period does not put Mr. Barroso on the right side of the law, and does not preclude the obligation of the Commission to take remedial action.