LL332      Half Unit
Advanced EU Law

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

Students should have completed the second year European Union Law course or an equivalent course from another department in the School.

This course is an advanced study of the European Union. It builds on the work students will have done in their second year and explores in more depth and in an inter-disciplinary fashion some of the most crucial questions that the EU and its legal system tackle.  

The course consists of two parts. In the first part, we will explore how to think about European integration – in its colonial, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, and what the role of law may be in this process. It analyses different methodological commitments in exploring these questions, and asks how the role of law has changed as the EU itself is facing new challenges. Is the ‘point’ of the EU to protect certain values or to articulate changing political preferences? How are the EU’s history and future imagined in today’s legal norms?  
 
The second part of the course applies what we’ve learned and explores a number of different dimensions of European integration. We will analyse and re-think how EU law is both an instrument that creates European integration, but also something that comes with specific economic, social and cultural assumptions and implications. The areas that we will explore will be taken from the following range: animal rights, geographical indication protection rules, LGBTQ+ rights, student mobility, over-tourism in the EU, equality law, and the legislation on the EU’s ‘strategic autonomy’. 

At the end of the course, students will have gained a deep proficiency with the EU as an institutional system and be able to critically evaluate the social dimension of European integration. 

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Essay (1500 words)

• Azoulai, ‘The Law of European Society’ (2022) 59 CMLR 203. 
• Van den Brink, Dawson, Zglinski, ‘Revisiting the asymmetry thesis: negative and positive integration in the EU’ (2024) JEPP. 
• Lewicki, 'East-West inequalities and the ambiguous racialisation of 'Eastern Europeans' (2023) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1481. 
• Kramer, ‘Airbnb, the City and the Drive for European Legal Integration’ (2024) 3 ELO (forthcoming). 
• Neuvonen, “A way of critique: What can EU legal scholars learn from critical theory?” (2022) European Law Open. 
• Panasci, ‘Unravelling Next Generation EU as a Transformative Moment: From Market Integration to Redistribution (2024) 61 CMLR 13. 
• Von Bogdandy, ‘The Emergence of European Society through Public Law’ (OUP 2024). 
• De Witte, ‘Where the Wild Things Are: Animal Autonomy in EU Law’ (2023) 60 CMLR 391 

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period