JJUA55068U Advanced EU Constitutional Law

The course is topic-oriented. It will give the students with an interest in the EU an opportunity to explore a selection of topics of European constitutional law, which are both fundamental (timeless) and timely. This means that the course will not provide the students with a general overview of European constitutional law nor adopt a linear narrative. Instead, we will initiate a dialogue and rethink established dogmas, address current constitutional challenges and venture into the European constitutional future. With regard to the Union’s constitutional past, the students will be encouraged to question the established narrative of constitutionalization through law and critically examine the arguments of the Court, pertaining to the autonomy and effectiveness of the EU legal order. With regard to the Union’s constitutional present, we will i.a. look closer at the reception and the application of European constitutional doctrines in national (Member State) settings. In this regard we will evaluate instances in which the reception of supremacy typically turns problematic (such as the protection of national constitutional rights and the dialogue between the Court of Justice and the German Constitutional Court). We will touch upon the frictions between the EU and the Member States and between the EU institutions. As to the Union’s future, we will analyse the relationship between European and international law, in particular in the field of human rights. Main topics covered include:

1. Europe’s constitutional past: Questioning the “constitutionalization through law” narrative
• Political process and judicial process of European constitutionalization
• Europe’s constitutional milestones in political and social context (critical reading of “grand cases” in EU law, such as Van Gend and Costa v ENEL, Internationale Handelsgesellchaft, ERT and Les Verts)

2. Europe’s constitutional present: challenges and dilemmas
• Europe’s new constitutional structure: ‘gaps’ between the formal constitution and the constitutional reality
• Implementing acts, delegated acts and accountability in the EU post-Lisbon
• Competences and subsidiarity pre and post-Lisbon
• Is the EU legal order autonomous?
• Primacy, Reception and Constitutional conflict
• Protection of fundamental rights in the EU and International legal order (Is the EU legal order autonomous?)
• The euro-crisis
• EU citizenship and political rights

3. Europe’s constitutional future
• Constitutionalism beyond the state (Constitutional pluralism)
• The future of European fundamental rights law, Accession to the ECHR