Sacha GarbenSacha Garben

Email: s.garben@lse.ac.uk
Room: New Academic Building 5.16
Tel. 020-7955-6714

Sacha Garben, fellow at LSE, studied at Maastricht University, the College of Europe in Bruges, and completed her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence entitled EU Higher Education Law - The Bologna Process and Harmonization by Stealth, which was published by Kluwer in 2011. She also spent a semester at Harvard Law School as a visiting researcher. Prior to joining LSE in September 2011, Sacha worked at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
 

Research interests

Sacha has a broad interest in all areas of EU law, both substantive and institutional. Up until now, her research has focused specifically on the free movement of people, higher education law, citizenship, new modes of governance, EU competence in fields of Member State autonomy, and the tensions between market integration and the welfare state model.

   

External Activities

Sacha is a monthly contributor to the Dutch legal journal Sociaal Economische Wetgeving (SEW) where she is co-responsible for the section on recent national case law with EU relevance.

 

Teaching

Books  

EU Higher Education Law.The Bologna Process and Harmonization by Stealth (Kluwer law, 2011)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

click here for publisher's site

 

Selected articles
and chapters in books		  

'The Bologna Process from a European Law Perspective' European Law Journal, Vol. 16, Issue 2, March 2010, pp. 186-210

The Bologna Process, an intergovernmental process of voluntary policy convergence towards a common higher education structure, poses several concerns from a European law perspective. The Bologna Process takes place outside the institutional framework of the EU, while there would have been legal competence to enact the content of the Bologna Declaration as a Community measure. Hence it could be argued that Member States have straddled the borders of loyal cooperation by avoiding the institutional framework of the EC with its built-in checks and balances. They have obstructed the Community in the attainment of its tasks, which stands in tense relation to Article 10 EC. Moreover, there exist several other objections against the Bologna Process, particularly in terms of democracy, transparency and efficiency. The Bologna Process resembles a deal done in a smoke-filled room, and its voluntary character combined with a lack of coordination prevents its effective implementation.

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Case C-73/08, Bressol, Chaverot and Others v. Gouvernement de la Communauté française Common Market Law Review, Vol. 47, October 2010, No. 5, pp. 1493 – 1510.

'The Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy: Commercialisation of Higher Education through the Back Door?' Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy, Vol. 6, 2010, pp. 167 –208.

The higher education sectors of European countries have been subjected to an unprecedented amount of reforms over the past decade. Much of these changes are the consequence of the Bologna Process, which introduces a common Bachelor-Master-Doctorate system in the participating countries, with a view to increasing the employability of the European citizen and the international competitiveness of Europe as a whole. Apart from the Bologna Process, the important EU policy project called the Lisbon Strategy clearly affects higher education policy, as its goal is to establish the world's most competitive knowledge economy. 'Lisbon' and 'Bologna' increasingly converge, particularly via the Open Method of Coordination, which is not surprising considering that they are both part of the same momentum. This momentum seems to regard education almost exclusively as an economic commodity, and it could therefore be argued that both policy projects contribute to a commercialisation of higher education. The desirability of this development is questionable, and the fact that both Bologna and Lisbon suffer from serious democratic defects indicates that much needed public-wide discussions are lacking.

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