Mark Dawson

• Hertie School

Recent changes to EU fiscal policy, such as the landmark economic governance reform package passed in early 2024, have established a dense ‘coordination space’ that steers crucial social and economic choices at the EU and national levels. This coordination space, however, departs significantly from its historical predecessors. It largely operates w...

Intrinsic relation between form and substance in law and between the institutional law of the EU and its substantive goals – idea and criteria for a ‘substantive core’ to the legal order – the internal market as early EU law’s substantive core – the EU’s changing policy substance and the subsequent ‘de-coring’ of the legal order – the consequences...

When looking for possible constraints on Differentiated Integration, the fundamental values of the European Union (EU) seem an obvious starting point. Both the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the values articulated in Art. 2 TEU are cross‐cutting across EU states. However, while fundamental values have acted as centralising devices in other feder...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/german-law-journal/issue/E84EE431E6F3E869F05800E01E134007

This Article introduces our Special Issue by posing a central question: What is the added value of the increasing prominence of the concept of the “essence” of fundamental rights in EU law? It will address this larger question in four steps: First, by examining the function of the concept in EU law and the methods for its derivation; second, by sum...

Hart Publishing

As the crisis (and the Union's response to it) further develops, one thing appears clear: the European Union post-crisis will be a very different animal from the pre-crisis EU. This article offers an alternative model for the EU's constitutional future. Its objective is to invert the Union's current path-dependency: changes to the way in which the...

This article analyses three prominent proposals for the functional and political transformation of the EU from a constitutional perspective. It argues that existing EU reform proposals, to varying degrees, entrench rather than reverse the challenges to individual and political self-determination brought about by the EU's response to its Euro crisis...

How should decision-making under EU economic governance be understood following the euro-crisis? This article argues, contra existing depictions, that the post-crisis EU has increasingly adopted methods of decision-making in the economic field which marry the decision-making structure of inter-governmentalism with the supervisory and implementation...

The failure of individual and institutional remedies to ensure the effective enforcement of European Union (EU) law has increasingly focused attention on collective routes to ensuring adherance to EU policies and rights. How comprehensive, however, should collective remedies under EU law be? This introductory article -As well as the other articles...

This review essay analyses two significant recent contributions to the debate over the reasoning of the Court of Justice (CJ). These contributions highlight the impossibility of a wholly scientific and deductive approach to attributing ‘correct’ outcomes to the Court's case-law. At the same time, their analysis adds significant findings for the deb...

According to Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, the European Union is a political and economic union founded on a respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law, referred to hereafter as EU fundamental values. The central place of this commitment in the EU Treaties suggests a founding assumption: That the EU is a Union of states who the...

This article analyses how the European Union's response to the euro-crisis has altered the constitutional balance upon which its stability is based. It argues that the stability and legitimacy of any political system requires the structural incorporation of individual and political self-determination. In the context of the EU, this requirement is m...

The present-day EU, as is well known, faces a serious crisis. As contributions to this volume make clear, that crisis is political as much as it is economic. Developments such as the limitations on national democracies established via the golden rule , as well as the exclusion of parliaments from EU decision-making, illustrate the grave challenges...

'This well-constructed, and well-written, collection fills a gap in the scholarship. It offers a rounded and plausible picture of the Court's role in Europe, engaging with the complexity of the law without losing sight of the bigger political picture. Well-contextualised, critical, but nuanced, discussions of the role of rights, economics, science,...

While much of the debate on judicial activism in the EU has focused on the degree of scrutiny that the European Courts should place on the political autonomy of the Member States, this paper will argue that the judicial activism debate carries deeply political origins. The limited mechanisms of political response on the part of the Union’s institut...

The extensive row between France and the European Commission over the deportation of EU citizens of Roma origin in the summer of 2010 created a wave of media and academic attention in Europe; a problem that, according to a recent report of human rights watch, has continued over the last year. Several experts have explored the conformity of the Fran...

This article analyses the evolving relationship in the EU between “new governance” methods and law, arguing that this relationship can be seen in three distinct “waves” of activity. While the last few years have seen a relative decline in the level of academic and institutional interest in new governance processes, recent developments, such as the...

From initially defining new governance processes as external to 'traditional' forms of EU law, a number of academic scholars have begun to argue that methods like the OMC can be seen as indicative of a broader 'transformation' of European law-making. The transformation thesis relies on seeing the OMC as an evolving legal mechanism, in which feature...

The increasing use in the EU of soft law norms has created an extensive debate over the centrality of law as the principle instrument of European integration. Under a certain understanding of legality - one that sees the function of law as the provision of stable normative expectations - the development of methods like the OMC appears as an explici...

The last 10 years of EU integration has seen a “rights revolution”, at least in so far as fundamental rights are increasingly the register through which legal conflicts in the EU are articulated. But how are EU fundamental rights enforced in a legal order where enforcement relies upon the navigation of multiple institutions and levels of law? This...