Presenting cutting-edge insights into the current state of EU legislation, this book addresses the profound changes that the EU’s legislature has undergone in recent years and how these shape the development of EU law. At the heart of this inquiry is how the strive for uniform EU legislation is balanced with the necessity to leave a certain degree of autonomy to Member States.

This book explores how the European Union has been responding to the challenge of diversity. In doing so, it considers the EU as a complex polity that has found novel ways for accommodating diversity. Much of the literature on the EU seeks to identify it as a unique case of cooperation between states that moves past classic international cooperation. This volume argues that in order to understand the EU’s effort in managing the diversity among its members and citizens it is more effective to look at the EU as a state. While acknowledging that the EU lacks key aspects of statehood, the authors show that looking at the EU efforts to balance diversity and unity through the lens of state policy is a fruitful way to understand the Union. Instead of conceptualising the EU as being incomparable and unique which is neither an international organisation nor a state, the book argues that EU can be understood as a polity that shares many approaches and strategies with complex and diverse states. As such, its effort to build political structures to accommodate diversity offers lessons to other such polities. The experience of the EU contributes to the understanding of how states and other polities can respond to challenges of diversity, including both the diversity of constituent units or of sub-national groups and identities.

This book offers insights into the legal mechanisms that are adopted in multilevel constitutional orders to accommodate the tension between contrasting interests of diversity and unity and the converging or diverging effects they may have on the functioning of a multilevel constitutional order. It does so by targeting mainly the European experience but also drawing insights from other jurisdictions. The volume draws on a well-rounded theoretical framework that allows a comprehensive discussion of the dialectics in multi-level systems.) It focuses on two of the most relevant areas of constitutional law, namely the setup of supranational institutions and the protection of fundamental human rights. Finally, the work presents a fresh legal take on the unity-diversity dichotomy. This collection is ideal for academics working in the fields of constitutional law, international law, federal theory, institutional design, management and accommodation of diversity, and protection of fundamental rights. Political scientists will also find the discussions very relevant as a foundation for further research in their field. Policymakers involved in constitutional engineering will be interested, as mechanisms of accommodation, convergence, and divergence are increasingly looked at as devices for managing multilevel polities.

Written by distinguished legal and linguistic scholars and practitioners from the EU institutions, the contributions in this volume provide multidisciplinary perspectives on the vital role of language and culture as key forces shaping the dynamics of EU law. The broad spectrum of topics sheds light on major Europeanization processes at work: the gradual creation of a neutralized EU legal language with uniform concepts, for example, in the DCFR and CESL, and the emergence of a European legal culture. The main focus is on EU multilingual lawmaking, with special emphasis on problems of legal translation and term formation in the multilingual and multicultural European context, including comparative law aspects and an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of translating from a lingua franca. Of equal importance are issues relating to the multilingual interpretation of EU legislation and case law by the national courts and interpretative techniques of the CJEU, as well as the viability of the autonomy of EU legal concepts and the need for the professionalization of court interpreters Union-wide in response to Directive 2010/64/EU. Offering a good mix of theory and practice, this book is intended for scholars, practitioners and students with a special interest in the legal-linguistic aspects of EU law and their impact on old and new Member States and candidate countries as well.

'Practising law, whether as a politician, a judge, a lawyer or an academic, is to a certain degree creating or influencing policy', Walter Van Gerven once wrote. This statement and many other similar or opposite statements make one wonder about the nature of the policies concerned, the identities of the decision makers and the rationale underlying those policies. On these and related questions PhD researchers from different Belgian law schools debated at the ACCA-conference held at Ghent University in May 2014. This book holds the fruits of those debates. Hence, the book contains concise contributions focusing on policy questions in matters related to various fields of law, such as environmental, constitutional, civil, social, criminal, procedural or EU law. It seeks to provide an insight into the interplay between legislators and administrative bodies on the one hand and judges and legal scholars on the other hand, bringing about the creation of a new policy or the adjustment or abolishment of an existing policy.

"Provides an analysis of the constitutional principles governing the European Union. It covers the history of the EU, the constitutional foundations, the institutional framework, legislative and executive governance, judicial protection, and external relations"--Publisher's website

The law and practice of EU external relations is governed not only by general objectives (Articles 3(5) and 21 TEU and Article 205 TFEU) and values (Article 2 TEU) but also by a set of principles found in the Treaties and developed by the Court of Justice, which structure the system, functioning and exercise of EU external competences. This book identifies a set of 'structural principles' as a legal norm-category governing EU external relations; it explores the scope, content and function of those principles that may be categorised as structural. With an ambitious scope, and a stellar line-up of experts in the field, the collection offers a truly innovative perspective on the role of law in EU external relations.

Ten years after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, has executive predominance in EU-related matters disappeared? How have executive-legislative relations in the EU evolved over a crisis-ridden decade, from the financial and migration crises, to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic? The Lisbon Treaty could be expected to lead to the re-balancing of powers in favour of parliaments, for it significantly enhanced the roles of both the European Parliament and national parliaments. A decade later the contributions to this edited volume examine – for the first time in such an extensive breadth and from a multi-level and cross-policy perspective – whether this has actually materialised. They highlight that diverging tendencies may be observed, and that important variations over time have occurred, depending particularly on the occurrence of crises. As stated in the fascinating epilogue by Peter Lindseth (University of Connecticut School of Law), this is an 'admirably coherent collective volume, whose contributions provide an excellent overview of key aspects of executive-legislative relations in the European system since the Treaty of Lisbon'. This edited volume will hence be of interest to both academics and practitioners interested in future reforms designed at the European and national levels to improve the EU's democratic quality.

How has European Union developed since its origins in the reconstruction of Europe in the wake of the Second World War, and why has it developed in this fashion? The principal theme of this book maintains that the EU is a site for the management of the interdependence of the States that are its members. A whole host of challenges - from climate change to security to migration to economic reform - can be tackled more effectively through multilateral action than by unilateral State action and the EU has become the principal location for that action in common. In essence, the States of the EU are stronger together than apart. In order to achieve multilateral action and participation, the EU requires its own legal order, comprising a range of legislative competences, political and judicial institutions, and a carefully shaped relationship with national law. In one sense, this legal order represents control over State autonomy yet in another it serves as means to ensure States, acting collectively, can meet the aspirations of their citizens in an interdependent world. The EU, as its power has increased, also needs to address questions of democracy, accountability, respect for fundamental rights and for national and local diversity. It should not be measured against the same benchmarks of legitimacy as a State as it will always fail, but it does need to achieve legitimacy. It needs, in short, values. And its Treaties aspire to grant it values. Does its system of governance, heavily implicated in the conferral of rights on individuals enforceable against the EU and Member States, today in areas far beyond the economy, live up to those aspirations? And can it? That is the terrain mapped by this book.

Over the last twenty years, processes of pluralization, differentiation and trans-nationalization in the European Union have arguably challenged the centrality of law to European integration. Yet these developments also present opportunities to investigate new understandings of law triggered by European integration. The contributors to this book revisit one of the first academic projects to conceptualise and study European legal integration - the early 'Integration through Law' School. On this basis, they consider continuities and discontinuities in the underlying social and political landscape which the law is to integrate (the 'object' of integration), the forms and capacities of the law itself (the 'agent' of integration), and the way these two dimensions reflect on each other. Displaying different normative concerns and varied theoretical starting points, all contributors maintain that 'integration through law' remains of enduring significance to the European integration process. The volume provides a valuable reference for scholars in the field of European integration studies and European legal and political theory.