LL453E      Half Unit
Law and Politics of the EU

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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The EU is central to all of the most pressing challenges that we face: migration, environment, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rule-of-law backsliding, AI regulation, trade wars, and rearmament. The EU is the biggest and most ambitious experiment with governance beyond the state.

This course focuses on how the EU works, and how it has navigated the tension between, on the one hand, the commitment to ‘do things together’, solve collective problems by cooperation and the creation of institutions beyond the state, and, on the other hand, the desire for domestic self-rule, national interests and political identities. It covers the institutional, constitutional, and substantive discussions that animate EU law and that influence the EU-UK relationship. It covers the EU law aspects of the GLD and SQE.

How is the European Union governed? This course will discuss this question in both a descriptive and a normative fashion. In descriptive terms, the course looks at the way in which the EU institutions are structured, how they function internally, and the powers that they have. It looks at the power of the European Court of Justice, at the role of fundamental rights, and the way in which the Treaty can be amended. This descriptive discussion forms the backdrop for the (more central) normative discussion: how should Europe be governed? Is the EU democratic? Should it be? Should Member States have more or less power to challenge EU measures? What will the future of the EU look like? And what should it look like?

Students will be challenged to think about the EU as an institutional structure in which both law and politics play a crucial role. Really understanding the EU requires knowledge of both areas as well as knowledge of their interaction. At no other time in the development of the EU has the interaction between law and politics so fundamentally affected the direction of the integration process. The coming years will see fundamental changes to the EU's structure; which are informed as much by political dynamics as by legal mechanisms. This course prepares you to fully understand those changes - and allow you to analyse critically both their normative content and institutional structure.

Substantive topics include Brexit, the rule-of-law crisis, the geopolitical role of the EU and other topics that will be determined in light of the never-ending list of crises that the EU manages.

25 hours of seminars

Students will have the option of producing a formative essay of 2000 words to be delivered one month from the end of the module’s teaching session by email.

Dawson & De Witte, 'EU Law and Governance' (CUP 2022)

Bonelli & Baraggia, ‘Linking Money to Values: the new Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation and its constitutional challenges’ (2022) GLJ

Leloup & Spieker, ‘Rethinking primacy’s effects: On creating, avoiding and filling legal vacuums in the national legal system’ (2024) 61 CMLR 913.

Zglinski, ‘The New Judicial Federalism: the evolving relationship between EU and national courts’ (2023) 2 ELO 345.

Bonelli, ‘Infringement Actions 2.0: How to Protect EU Values before the Court of Justice’ (2022) 18 EUConst 30.  

Oral examination (100%)