Miguel Poiares Maduro

• Universidade Católica Portuguesa and European University Institute

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an important case study, on a global scale, of how democracy works - and fails to work - today. From leadership to citizenship, from due process to checks and balances, from globalization to misinformation, from solidarity within and across borders to the role of expertise, key democratic concepts both old and ne...

The rule of law is under threat in the European Union. Systemic violations of fundamental rights are affecting the rule of law, democracy, and judicial independence in some Member States and consequently the EU legal order. The level of interdependence between the Member States and the EU legal order is such that systemic violations of those princi...

This Policy Brief highlights the main challenges and issues on sports governance and puts forward alternative recommendations to address them in the future: 1. The Love for Sports and the Business of Sports. 2. Challenges and Issues of Sports Governance: Concentration of Power and the Role of Independence and Checks and Balances in Sports Governanc...

This report presents the results of an exploratory research jointly conducted by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre - Directorate for Growth and Innovation, Human Capital & Employment Unit, and a team of external experts from the European University Institute, School of Transnational Governance. The aim of the study is to review social...

The authors criticize the Constitutional Court's jurisprudence of crisis on the main ground that it articulates the relationship between EU law and internal constitutional law in such a manner as to deny any possible conflict and need for reconciliation. This “autarchic” approach to EU Law suffers from two main flaws. First of all, it can only be a...

One of the greatest objects of judicial activity and academic commentary in European Union (EU) law has been the free movement of goods. The free movement of goods continues to generate intense debates because it is at the intersection of complex and difficult choices between public regulation and market freedom, on the one hand, and EU and state p...

This essay tries to offer a different perspective on free movement of goods by looking at it in comparison with its US equivalent. When reviewing State measures which affect trade, courts are both setting limits on the exercise of State powers and impacting on the degree of regulation in a market. The extent of regulatory powers that can still be e...

In this essay, I argue that national constitutionalism is simply a contextual representation of constitutionalism whose dated and artificial borders are challenged by European constitutionalism. In themselves, constitutional ideals are not dependent nor legitimised by the borders of national polities. As a consequence, there is often no a priori cl...

This Article revisits the traditional debate on the role of courts in relation to the constitution. It highlights how this debate often ignores the nature of constitutionalism itself. It is argued that, first, traditional theories of judicial review fail to fully recognize and engage with the pluralist character of constitutionalism and, second, th...

The report provides a democratic explanation for the crisis and the EU’s failure in successfully addressing it so far. It argues that the solution to the crisis and the future of EU governance must depart from a renewed justification of the project of European integration which must be founded on its democratic and justice enhancing potential. It c...

There is a generalised perception that the European Court of Justice has adopted different approaches to the different free movement rules included in the Treaties. In particular, the free movement of goods has ‘benefited’, until 1993, from a wider scope of application. Contrary to what has for long constituted the standard approach to the free mov...

Law is a discipline in transition moving, among others, from a predominantly monodisciplinary dogmatic tradition towards more and more attention for multidisciplinary and empirical legal research, from a national to a more international and global orientation and from a research culture of ‘laissez faire’ towards more managerial control, rankings a...

In its first part, the article provides the historical context for the adoption of the Treaty on Stability. Acknowledging the political irreversibility of its endorsement, it assesses the problems posed by a number of its clauses, namely in juridical interpretation. In the second half, an evaluation is carried out of the political inability the eu...

This book discusses the future of the EU legal order by examining, from a variety of different perspectives, the most important judgments of the ECJ which established the foundations of the EU legal order. A distinguished line-up of contributors - drawn from among former and current members of the Court; scholars from other disciplines or lawyers f...

This paper approaches the debates on the nature and position of social policy in the EU by putting them in the context of a discussion on Europe’s constitutional identity and its social self. In this way, the paper relates the current debates on the European Union’s social policy to other recent or anticipated constitutional developments. The paper...

The currency of constitutionalism has become the dominant currency of the debates on European integration. But do we really know what we mean by constitutionalism in the European Union? We have moved from talking about a process of constitutionalisation to question whether such process represented a European Constitution (does Europe has a Constitu...

The rethinking of the traditional role of the State in the market has brought with it a variety of new forms of exercise of public power and an increased blurring of the private/public distinction in the market. It is now common, for example, for the State to intervene in the market not through the traditional mechanisms of regulation or public own...

One of the main functions of constitutionalism is that of installing reason into a democracy. I will briefly highlight some examples of how this works.As said, I conceive constitutionalism as an instrument of rationalization of democracy. In my view, it shapes democratic reason in at least three ways. First, constitutionalism defines the scope of d...

There is an emerging body of literature that describes a context of constitutional and legal pluralism. Usually constitutional pluralism identifies the phenomenon of a plurality of constitutional sources of authority that create a context for potential constitutional conflicts between different constitutional orders to be solved in a nonhierarchica...

This working paper examines the role of the Court of Justice in a context of constitutional pluralism, distinguishing between internal and external sources of pluralism in the European legal order. It briefly reviews the methods of interpretation employed by the Court of Justice with a focus on the importance of comparative law and teleological rea...

In these closing remarks I want to highlight three paradoxes of mutual recognition that emerge from this excellent set of contributions on mutual recognition. The first relates to the underlying theme of this volume: although mutual recognition is prima facie a conflicts rule, such a rule entails, in fact, a process of social decision-making that i...

Following the dramatic No votes in the French and Dutch referendums on 29 May and 1 June 2005, a need was felt in the European constitutional law profession to react to the shock. EuConst invited members of its Board and members of the European Constitutional Law Network to write a short comment about possible and possibly salutary effects of the e...

Altneuland: The European Constitutional Terrain It is in many respects a New Land - for the first time the Union is openly, officially using the word Constitution in its formal self-understanding. But this, in turn, places it, at least lexically, in the age old terrain of constitutionalism which has been around in its modern guise at least since th...

This article takes as its starting-point the relationship between Article 30 of 30 of the EC Treaty (general rule on the free movement of goods) and the European Constitution. On the one hand, it examines Article 30 in the context of the constitutional dilemmas facing the European Union, particularly the balance of powers to be defined between Memb...

Book reviewed in this essay: Phelan, D. Rossa, Revolt or Revolution: The Constitutional Boundaries of the European Community

For all its achievements in integrating Europe, the EU lacks a human rights policy which is coherent, balanced and professionally administered. Whether in relation to access to Community justice, sex equality, race and disability discrimination, or policing, or in its external policies from Kosovo to China, the Union needs new principles, procedure...