Professor Floris de Witte

M. Dawson & F. De Witte, EU Law and Governance (CUP 2022)

This textbook offers a fresh, accessible, and interdisciplinary take on EU law. In light of the current state of European integration, EU law cannot meaningfully be appreciated without understanding the political, social and cultural context within which it operates. The textbook therefore aims to answer one question: ‘what is the EU for?’ Using this central narrative, the authors situate the institutions, legal order and central policy domains of the EU in its context, offering students the tools to critically analyse and reflect on European integration and the consequences that it has.

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re:generation Europe – ten ideas for another Europe (Palgrave McMillan, 2019)

This book sets out a vision for another Europe: one that cherishes diversity, listens to its public, and is sensitive to its younger generations. It is a call for a re-imagination of the European project, as a response to the three biggest crises that the EU has had to endure – the Euro-zone crash, the refugee crisis, and Brexit. These crises demonstrate a fundamental weakness at the heart of the EU: it struggles with making legitimate decisions when Member States disagree about how to proceed. This book offers a guide out of this mess. It discusses how the EU can make better use of the trust between its citizens, and how it can reform itself internally so that it can actually listen to those citizens. It also offers ten original policy proposals – from the scandalously ambitious to the prosaic – to show what another Europe could look like.

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Justice in the EU: The Emergence of Transnational Solidarity, Oxford Studies in European Law (OUP, 2015)

In Justice in the EU: The Emergence of Transnational Solidarity, Floris de Witte argues that European Union law can be understood as an instrument for the elaboration of what justice is, means, and requires on the level beyond the nation state. Approaching the question of justice from the European perspective, however, challenges us to think beyond the contractarian idea that equates justice with national political self-determination. A proper model of justice demands a tiered institutional and normative understanding of justice, involving both the nation state and the EU, which can make sense of the new ties between individual citizens that the process of European integration continues to generate. It also requires that we construct a theory of transnational solidarity that can explain what those new ties tell us about our transnational obligations of justice.

This book tackles three issues in turn. It explains which precise institutional and normative structures are indispensable in the pursuit of justice; how the European Union can be understood to increase our capacity for the attainment of justice; and formulates a theory of transnational solidarity that informs the interaction between national and European spheres. Three different types of transnational solidarity are identified and carefully traced throughout the case law of the Court of Justice: market solidarity, communitarian solidarity, and aspirational solidarity. Read together, these three transnational solidarities tell us exactly what justice means in the EU.

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• 'Is this Europe?: EU law’s rendering of European society' (2025) European Law Open (online first)
• 'Finding space in EU Law' Transnational Legal Theory (2024) 1-10
• ‘The judicial politics of solidarity’ in Dawson et al. (eds.) Revisiting Judicial Politics in the European Union (Elgar, 2024) 77-99
• ‘Where the Wild Things Are: Animal Autonomy in EU Law’ Common Market Law Review 60 (2023), 391-430
• 'You Are What You Ate: Food Heritage and the EU’s Internal Market' European Law Review 2022, 47(5), 647-665
• 'The Idea of Europe in Football' (2022) 1 European Law Open 286 (with Jan Zglinski)
• 'Here be Dragons: Legal geography and EU law' (2022) 1 European Law Open 113
• 'The Liminal European: Subject to the EU Legal Order' (2021) 40 Yearbook of European Law 56
• 'Integrating the Subject: Narratives of Emancipation in Regionalism' (2019) EJIL 30 (1), 257-278
• 'Interdependence and Contestation in European Integration' (2018) 3 European Papers 475-509
• 'The constitutional quality of the free movement provisions: looking for context in the case law on Article 56 TFEU' (2017) 41 ELRev pp.313-338
• 'Freedom of movement under attack: is it worth defending as the core of EU citizenship?' RSCAS Working Paper 2016/69
• 'From Balance to Conflict: A New Constitution for the EU' (2016) 22 European Law Journal 204-224 (co-authored with M. Dawson).
• 'Emancipation through EU Law?', in: L. Azoulai, S. Barbou des Places and E. Pataut Ideas of the Person and Personhood in EU law (Hart 2016).
• 'The Architecture of the “Social Market Economy”' in: P. Koutrakos and J. Snell (eds.), Research Handbook on EU internal market law (Elgar Publishing, 2017), also available as LSE Working Paper.
• 'Self-Determination in the Constitutional Future of the EU'European Law Journal (2015) (with Mark Dawson)
• 'Sex, Drugs & EU Law: The recognition of ethical and moral diversity in Europe’ (2013) 50 Common Market Law Review, Issue 6 (December 2013) pp. 1545–1578
• 'Union Citizenship and Constrained Democracy' in A.P. Van der Mei and M. De Visser (eds.) Twenty Years Treaty on European Union: Reflections from Maastricht (Intersentia, 2013)
• 'Constitutional Balance in the EU after the Euro-crisis'Modern Law Review (2013) 76 (5) pp.817-844 (with Mark Dawson)
• 'EU law, Politics, and the Social Question’German Law Journal (2013) 14 (5)
• 'Ending the Honeymoon: Constructing Europe Beyond the Market' German Law Journal (2013) 14 (5) (wth Moritz Hartmann)
• 'Who funds the mobile student? Shedding some light on the normative assumptions underlying EU free movement law: Commission v Netherlands.'C.M.L. Rev. 2013, 50(1), 203-215
• ‘The role of transnational solidarity in mediating conflicts of justice in Europe’ (2012) 18 European Law Journal, p. 694-710.
• ‘Bosman: een verloren voetballer en de Europese droom’, in: G. Essers, A.P. Van der Mei and F. Van Overmeiren (eds.), Het vrije verkeer van personen in 60 klassieke arresten (Kluwer, Den Haag, 2012).
• ‘National Welfare as Transnational Justice?: An Institutional Analysis of the Normative (in)coherence of Europe’s Social Dimension’ in: J. Rutgers (ed.), European Contract Law and the Welfare State (Europa Law Publishing, Groningen, 2012), p. 15-41.
• ‘The End of EU citizenship and Means of Non-Discrimination’ (2011) 18 Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, p. 86-108
• ‘The European Judiciary after Lisbon’ (2008) 15 Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, p. 43-55