Dr Jan Zglinski

Europe's Passive Virtues: Deference to National Authorities in EU Free Movement Law (Oxford University Press, 2020)

The European Court of Justice has been celebrated as a central force in the creation and deepening of the EU internal market. Yet, it has also been criticized for engaging in judicial activism, restricting national regulatory autonomy, and taking away the powers of Member State institutions. In recent years, the Court appears to afford greater deference to domestic actors in free movement cases. Europe's Passive Virtues explores the scope of and reasons for this phenomenon. It enquires into the decision-making latitude given to the Member States through two doctrines: the margin of appreciation and decentralized judicial review.

At the heart of the book lies an original empirical study of the European Court's free movement jurisprudence from 1974 to 2013. The analysis examines how frequently and under which circumstances the Court defers to national authorities. The results suggest that free movement law has substantially changed over the past four decades. The Court is leaving a growing range of decisions in the hands of national law-makers and judges, a trend that affects the level of scrutiny applied to Member State action, the division of powers between the European and national judiciary, and ultimately the nature of the internal market. The book argues that these new-found 'passive virtues' are linked to a series of broader political, constitutional, and institutional developments that have taken place in the EU.

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• ‘Reforming football: what the EU can do’ German Law Journal (2025)
• ‘The European Sports Act: a proposal to improve sports governance through EU legislation’ LSE Law, Society and Economy Working Papers (10/2025) (with Jan Exner, Jan and Stephen Weatherill)
• 'Where law meets data: a practical guide to expert coding in legal research' (2025) European Law Open (w. M. Ovádek and P. Schroeder)
• 'Who Owns Football? The Future of Sports Governance and Regulation after European Superleague' (2024) 49 European Law Review 454-477 (previously published as LSE Legal Studies Working Paper 9/2024)
• 'The Internal Market as a Dynamic Process: Five Scenarios for the Future' in Adams-Prassl et al. (eds.), The Internal Market Ideal: Essays in Honour of Stephen Weatherill (Oxford University Press 2024)
• 'Governing the internal market: from judicial politics to ordinary politics' in Dawson et al. (eds.) Revisiting Judicial Politics in the European Union (Elgar 2024)
• 'The End of Negative Market Integration: 60 Years of Free Movement of Goods Litigation in the EU (1961–2020)' (2024) 31 Journal of European Public Policy 633
• 'Can EU competition law save sports governance?' (2023) 23 International Sports Law Journal 475
• 'The new judicial federalism: the evolving relationship between EU and Member State courts' (2023) European Law Open 345
• 'Revisiting the asymmetry thesis: negative and positive integration in the EU' (w. M. van den Brink and M. Dawson) (2023) European Journal of Public Policy
• 'The UK Internal Market: A Global Outlier?' (2023) 82 Cambridge Law Journal 350
• 'The EU Free Movement of Goods Dataset' (2022) Harvard Dataverse
• 'The Idea of Europe in Football' (2022) 1 European Law Open 286 (with Floris de Witte)
• 'The Principle of Proportionality in EU Law and Its Domestic Application: Ni tout à fait le même, ni tout à fait un autre' (with E. Bjorge), in K. Ziegler, P. Neuvonen and V. Moreno-Lax (eds.), Research Handbook on General Principles of EU Law (Edward Elgar 2022)
• 'Rules, Standards, and the Video Assistant Referee in Football' (2021) 16 Sports, Ethics and Philosophy 3
• 'Contestation and Accommodation: Constitutional and Private Law Pluralism(s) in the EU' in L. De Almeida et al. (eds.), The Transformation of Economic Law – Essays in Honour of Hans-W. Micklitz (Hart, 2019) (with Bosko Tripkovic)
• 'Doing Too Little or Too Much? Private Law Before the European Court of Human Rights' (2018) 37 Yearbook of European Law 98
• Review of Agha (ed.), Human Rights Between Law and Politics: The Margin of Appreciation in Post-National Contexts (2018) 43 European Law Review 977
• 'The Rise of Deference: The Margin of Appreciation and Decentralized Judicial Review in EU Free Movement Law' (2018) 55 Common Market Law Review 1341
• 'Der “Motor der Integration” schaltet einen Gang runter: Die neue Zurückhaltung des Gerichtshofes der Europäischen Union' (2017) for Europe Direct/Info-Point Europa
• 'What Courts Do When They Do What They Do' in H. Micklitz and L. Vicente (eds), Interdisciplinary Research: Are We Asking the Right Questions in Legal Research? (EUI Working Paper 2015/4 2015)