Dr Floris De Witte

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law and LLB in Laws. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

This course will be seminar-based (20 hours of teaching time). Reading Week will be used to consolidate knowledge and work on the formative.

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. This includes both institutional and substantive dimensions. On the institutions side of things, we will discuss modes of law-making, questions pertaining to the structure of the judicial system and its relationship with national legal system, problems in the enforcement of EU law, and the challenges of reforming the EU. On the substantive side of things, this course looks at the equality policies of the EU, highlighting the many different dimensions of equality that the EU engages with (in more or less successful ways), including an analysis of racial equality, the rights of LGBTQ+ families, welfare rights for migrants, and animal rights. Both sides of the course complement each other: it is not possible to understand how the EU engages in its substantive policies without an affinity with the powers that shape law-making and dominate enforcement practices; nor is it useful to focus on the institutions without a substantive analysis of what the EU’s powerful machinery is used for.

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.

Topics:

‒ Weeks 1-5: Legislative Law-Making, Executive Law-Making, Judicial Independence, Preliminary Reference Procedure, Infringement Procedure, Revision and Differentiation.

‒ Weeks 7-11: Racial Equality, Migration, LGBTQ+ family rights, Welfare rights, Animal Rights.

20 hours of seminars in the AT. 2 hours of seminars in the ST.

1,500 word essay.

‒ M. Hillebrandt & P. Leino-Sandberg, ‘Adminstrative and Judicial Oversight of Trilogues’ (2021) JEPP 53.

‒ V. Schmidt, ‘European Emergency Politics and the Question of Legitimacy’ (2022) 29 JEPP 979.

‒ Klose, Perot, Temizisler, ‘Spot the Difference: Differentiated Co-operation and Differentiated Integration in the European Union’ (2022) JCMS forthcoming.

‒ O’Brien, ‘Civis Capitalist Sum: Class as the New Guiding Principle of EU Free Movement Rights’ (2016) 53 Common Market Law Review 937

‒ De Witte, ‘The Liminal European: Subject to the EU Legal Order’ (2021) 40 Yearbook of European Law 56

‒ Schiek, ‘On Uses, Mis-Uses and Non-Uses of Intersectionality Before the Court of Justice (EU)’ (2018) 18 International Journal of Discrimination and the Law 82

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.