The Bank, the Bond and the Bail-Out: On the Legal Construction of Market Discipline in the Eurozone

The ‘logic of the market’, so holds the Court of Justice, is the standard of legality of financial assistance to indebted member states under EU law and, ultimately, the legal justification for strict conditionality and the imposition of austerity. This logic of the market, though, is different from actual market behaviour. Austerity, it turns out, is not the inevitable response to market pressures but a function of political substitutes for market discipline (Pringle) and technocratic truth seeking about the ‘correct’ price of debt (Gauweiler) which the Court has frozen into law. The perverse consequence of making the modalities of financial assistance dependent on the ‘logic of the market’ is, moreover, to render the assistance as ineffective and expensive as possible. ‘The logic of the market’ in the Court's case law is best seen as punitive and cynical politics masquerading as inept economics

Argentina — Import Measures: How a Porsche is Worth Peanuts

The dispute Argentina-Measures Affecting the Importation of Goods concerns a series of measures imposed by Argentine authorities on economic operators as a condition for obtaining import licenses. These measures were introduced with the goal of advancing the Argentine government’s stated policies of re-industrialization, import substitution, and elimination of trade balance deficits. From a legal point of view, the least interesting feature of the dispute was the substantive compatibility of these measures with Article XI:1 GATT as they clearly constituted import restrictions. Identifying and classifying the measures involved, however, proved more challenging: based on vague policy guidelines, devoid of any legal basis, and consisting largely of wholly discretionary ad hoc action by the authorities, clouded in confidential obscurity, the measures escaped familiar categories and distinctions of WTO law. From an economic perspective, although Argentina’s measures appear to have had no impact on its overall imports, they imposed large costs on foreign companies, as well as on Argentine importers and consumers. ISSN: 1028-362

What Blanchard gets wrong: the puzzling persistence of managerialism in EU fiscal governance

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted renewed debate over the architecture of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. Marco Dani, Dario Guarascio, Joana Mendes, Agustin José Menéndez, Harm Schepel and Mike Wilkinson respond to a recent proposal to overhaul the EU’s current fiscal framework. They argue that while the EU’s fiscal rules should undoubtedly be reformed, a more radical solution is required that puts democratic politics at the heart of the EU’s fiscal governance

The European Brotherhood of Lawyers: The Reinvention of Legal Science in European Private Law

Against the historical backdrop of the codification debate in nineteenth century Germany, this article traces the reassertion of ‘legal science’ as an autonomous source of European legal integration in current legal and political discourse about the harmonization of European private law. The article argues that a grasp of widely shared ideas about the role and function of legal science and legal scientists is vital both towards an understanding of the extraordinary impact of the academic project of a European civil code on legal and political discourse in the Union in particular and towards furthering the theory of legal fields in general

The New Approach to the New Approach: The Juridification of Harmonized Standards in EU Law

In July 2012, the Court of Justice rendered judgment in Fra.bo, a case about the liability of a German private standards body under the free movement of goods. In October 2012, the European Parliament and Council adopted Regulation 1025/2012 on European Standardization, the long awaited formal legal framework for the cooperation between the Commission and the European Standards Organizations. It is very unlikely that either the Court or the Union legislators were planning in these instances to affect a radical overhaul of the New Approach to technical harmonization. And yet, that is exactly what they did. The result of Fra.bo and the new Regulation is to subject European harmonized standards to judicial challenge by any disgruntled manufacturer of products excluded or adversely affected by the contents of such a standard. To have each and every manufacturer or importer complain in each and every court of the Union about each and every harmonized standard that adversely affects its position on the market, however, is much more likely to lead to wholesale paralysis than it is to increase the procedural integrity of European standardization

Law and European Integration: Socio-Legal Perspectives

[Introduction]. European Union Legal Integration has been the subject of a rich, interdisciplinary literature. Studies on the powers of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the dynamics of preliminary rulings, on the constitutionalization of the Treaties, and the reach of EU law into national legal systems, abound. Scholars have theorized that the ECJ and EU law have been a driving force of integration, perhaps the driving force in times of eurosclerosis as suggested by Cassis de Dijon and other famous rulings. It is all the more surprising then that we know little about the professions that partake in the process, the judges, jurists and lawyers that are implicated. We now have many studies on the Commission or the Parliament and on Brussels interest groups. EU policy studies tend to focus on actors within these institutions, only mentioning in passing the relevant jurisprudence in their area. Legal expertise is often seen as key in pushing policy agendas yet it is taken for granted rather than analysed. Yet, if EU law is so important in the history of European integration, a promising research agenda would be to take EU legal studies and EU lawyers as an object of study. How has the EU changed the teaching of law in member states’ universities? What is its reach in the various sub-disciplines of the field? Is a European doctrine emerging? What is the trajectory of those that specialize in EU law? What is the ECJ judges’ vision of the role of the law? These are among the questions that a sociology of EU law could answer. As EUSA brings together many disciplines including legal scholars and other social sciences, this issue should be of interest to most of us. To help develop a sociology of EU law, this forum brings together two legal scholars that reflect on the ways that the community of EU lawyers conceives EU law. The lively debate between Harm Schepel and Damian Chalmers suggests that there is a plurality of position in the legal field as to the role of EU law and its relationship to European society, politics and economics