Advanced EU Constitutional Law

This course aims to give students an in-depth understanding of the development, structure and techniques of EU constitutional law, while learning how to strategically use EU constitutional law to address contemporary challenges of statecraft, politics and social change.

This course will provide students with the opportunity to examine the relevance of EU constitutional law in addressing questions such as economic inequality, climate sustainability, migration, health, discrimination, and peacekeeping. The course places methodological emphasis on the interaction between academics and practitioners, legal theory and the practise of law, to build students’ capacity to use law to achieve social change.

More broadly, the course will equip Master students beginning to think about their future careers, for instance within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, EU or UN institutions, with ideas about how to make a positive difference in Europe and beyond; consciousness of inequities in legal analysis and practise; and ways of harnessing an interest in leadership.

This course is divided into two parts:

In the first part, we study the core components of EU constitutional law in context. What distinguishes the EU institutions in comparative perspective and how do they interact with national and international institutions? Who are the state and non-state actors using EU constitutional law in their daily practise? How can we read EU legal sources, legal principles and legal reasoning contextually, i.e. from historical, political and economic perspectives?

In the first part students will also be encouraged to think critically about how EU constitutional law has developed from 1957 until today. This involves understanding the way in which the Treaties are written, the democratic legitimacy of the institutions and how to reform them, the role of the Court and the development of its case law, as well as the constitutional implications of the enlargements of the EU and the gradual expansion of policy areas covered by EU law. We will pay particularly close attention to the legal status of the individual, and the development of EU citizenship rights.

In the second part, we study how the tools and techniques offered by EU constitutional law can be used to solve large scale societal issues such as economic inequality, climate sustainability, migration, health, discrimination, and peacekeeping.

We will study the construction and reception of new legislative proposals from the EU institutions, as well as the construction and reception of case law from the Court of Justice of the EU. Each student will also work on a short paper, which will ultimately be used as their exam synopsis, outlining the ways in which EU constitutional law can address a societal problem that they are interested in solving. During the second part of the course each student will present the main points of their papers in class and receive feedback from a colleague, as well as the teacher.

In this part we will invite external guests such as politicians, officials of the EU institutions, Brussels lobbyists, cause lawyers, activists, trade unionists, business leaders, etc., to speak with the aim of understanding how these ‘practitioners’ work with EU constitutional law to achieve the societal change that they are interested in pursuing.