GOLEM Seminar Series – Book Launch: Contested Competences in the European Union

LSE Law School is pleased to host a book launch for Dr Michal Ovádek's Contested Competences in the European Union: The Law and Politics of Institutional Choice (Oxford University Press, 2026), as part of the GOLEM seminar series. The book is available open access here.

Competences and procedures are usually treated as fixed constitutional features, setting the framework within which the EU's institutions draft and bargain over legislative proposals. This book argues that they are, in fact, frequently contested and reimagined in practice. Drawing on historical records and quantitative data, Ovádek shows how the European Commission, Parliament and Council strategically reshape legal competences to advance their institutional and political goals, with the Court of Justice providing only limited and selective oversight. The result is a recurring pattern of legal disputes over "who decides, and how" that has become a stable feature of EU governance. The book offers a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of this dynamic, casting new light on the flexible, political nature of EU lawmaking.

Speaker: Dr Michal Ovádek (UCL)

Discussant: Dr Vilija Vėlyvytė (KCL)

Discussant: Professor N. Piers Ludlow (LSE)

Chair: Dr Jan Zglinski (LSE Law School)

Michal Ovádek is a Lecturer in European Institutions, Politics and Policy at UCL. His research focuses on the interaction of law and politics in the European Union, particularly the decision-making of the Court of Justice under institutional and political constraints.

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