Enforcing Fundamental Rights in the European Union After the Treaty of Lisbon: What can the Roma case tell us?

With contributions from scholars in a range of different disciplines, this book reflects upon the achievements and failures to date of integration efforts aimed at Europe's Romani populations. The snapshots provided examine a variety of integration efforts at different levels and involving a range of institutional actors. In doing so, they offer a comprehensive introduction to aspects of human rights and integration within the European Union as well as crucial insights as to the current state of affairs in Europe as policy makers reflect on the current direction of initiatives to combat Romani exclusion.(About the Book

The European Court as a Political Actor

This book delves into the rationale, components of, and responses to accusations of judicial activism at the European Court of Justice. Detailed chapters from academics, practitioners and stakeholders bring diverse perspectives on a range of factors – from access rules to institutional design and to substantive functions – influencing the European Court’s political role. Each of the contributing authors invites the reader to approach the debate on the role of the Court in terms of a constantly evolving set of interactions between the EU judiciary, the European and national political spheres, as well as a multitude of other actors vested in competing legitimacy claims. The book questions the political role of the Court as much as it stresses the opportunities – and corresponding responsibilities – that the Court’s case law offers to independent observers, political institutions and civil society organisations. Judicial Activism at the European Court of Justice will appeal to researchers and graduate students as well as to EU and national officials. (About the Book

A tool-box for Legal and Political Mobilisation in European Equality law

Over the past few decades, European countries have witnessed a proliferation of legal norms concerning marginalised individuals and minorities who increasingly invoke them in front of courts to assert their rights and claim protection. The present volume explores the relationship between law, rights and social mobilisation in Europe. It specifically enquires into the extent and ways in which legal processes and entitlements are mobilised by less privileged social actors to advance their rights claims and pursue social change. Most distinctly, it explores such processes in the context of the multi-level European system, characterised by the existence of multiple legal and judicial arenas at the national, subnational and supranational/transnational level. In such a complex system of law and governance in Europe, concepts like legal opportunity structures, as well as the factors shaping them need to be reconceptualised. How does the multi-level European context distinctly shape the nature and salience of rights, as well as their mobilisation by individuals and minority actors