Suspended in 2025/26
LL4GH      Half Unit
The European Market

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The EU’s internal market is the biggest in the world in terms of GDP. It is also one of the most powerful legal systems in the world, with a global regulatory influence on a variety of matters. It covers technical areas such as financial services, and more practical questions such as the sale of alcoholic products. Understanding the EU’s market is understanding not just how the EU’s economy is structured, but how economic goals interact with social, cultural, and other normative concerns. 

This course takes you through the institutional configuration of the EU’s internal market, highlighting how judicial power and legislative power intersect. It focuses on some of the most contentious and high-profile aspects of the internal market, including the corporate, financial, and digital market. Finally, it reflects on the interaction between the EU’s market and the UK and global markets.

Topics: 

• The Structure of the Internal Market: Judicial and Legislative
• Trade Barriers and Defences
• The Corporate Market
• The Social Market
• The Digital Market
• The Financial Market 
• Global Markets and UK-EU Trade

2 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

• Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (OUP 2020)
• Egan, Single Markets: Economic Integration in Europe and the United States (OUP 2014)
• Dunne, ‘Liberalisation and the Pursuit of the Internal Market’ (2018) 34 European Law Review 803
• Snell, ‘The Internal Market and the Philosophies of Market Integration’ in Peers and Barnard (eds.), European Union Law (3rd ed, OUP 2020) 334
• Sadl, López Zurita and Piccolo, ‘Route 66: Mutations of the Internal Market Explored Through the Prism of Citation Networks’ (2023) 21 International Journal of Constitutional Law 826
• Ashiagbor, ‘Unravelling the Embedded Liberal Bargain: Labour and Social Welfare Law in the Context of EU Market Integration’ (2013) 19 European Law Journal 303
• Havelková, ‘Women on Company Boards: Equality Meets Subsidiarity’ (2019) 21 Cambridge Journal of European Legal Studies 187
• De Gregorio, ‘The Rise of Digital Constitutionalism in the European Union’ (2021) 19 International Journal of Constitutional Law 41
• Zglinski, 'The UK Internal Market: A Global Outlier?' (2023) 82 Cambridge Law Journal 350.

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