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Methodological choices in the legal study of the role of EU institutions – The so-called doctrinal legal method is appropriate, provided that it includes the analysis of key elements of non-legal institutional practice – Simple distinction between the study of ‘law in the books’ and that of ‘law in action’ to be qualified – Doctrinal legal scholarship is meaningful only when it acknowledges and incorporates a certain amount of ‘law in action’

Euro crisis reforms as major example of interstitial institutional change in the EU - Forms of institutional change : unusual sources of law, new tasks for the EU institutions, new organs, competence creep, institutional hybrids, and more differentiated integration - Question whether some or all of this amounts to a ‘constitutional mutation’ of the EU legal order - Reasons to doubt whether the constitutional fundamentals have changed - Alternative thesis: increased institutional variation, deepening the differences between EMU law and the rest of EU law.

This contribution to the Dialogue discusses the contribution by Federico Fabbrini, in which he proposes an innovative way forward for the reform of the European Union (F. Fabbrini, Reforming the EU Outside the EU? The Conference on the Future of Europe and Its Options, in European Papers, Vol. 5, 2020, No 2, www.europeanpapers.eu, forthcoming). Given the extreme difficulty of reaching a unanimous agreement among all the Member States on a formal revision of the European Treaties, he proposes the use of international agreements among \"willing\" States to take forward an ambitious reform. This would take the form of a \"Political Compact\" among those States, whereas the other States would not participate in it and would not be bound by its content. This contribution discusses the legal feasibility of this \"Political Compact\" option.

International law in constitutional change of EU – Rigidity of amendment – EU amending and accession treaties not reviewable – International law in internal development of Union law – Conventions/treaties by member states jointly – Acts of the representatives of the governments – International law in the agreements with third states – Exportation of legal rules – Conditionality policies – Legislating through international agreements

It is often said that the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is a form of soft law and that it takes place outside the competences of the EU. This Article critically examines both these statements. It argues that OMC processes must, under the principle of conferral, be within the limits of the competences attributed to the EU by the Treaties, and that this is also the case in practice. It further argues that, whereas the OMC does produce soft law instruments in the field of employment, most of the other OMC processes produce neither hard nor soft law but policy documents which may or may not be taken into account by the Member States in the respective policy domains. The Article concludes that the OMC is a form of EU-level cooperation that operates within a legal framework defined by EU competences and the EU institutional balance, but that mostly does not use legal tools, either of the hard or soft variety, in its policy output.

This Article introduces the Special Section \"Usual and Unusual Suspects: New Actors, Roles and Mechanisms to Protect EU Values\" which collects four Articles originally presented at the NOVA workshop \"EU Democracy and the Rule of Law\" in June 2021. The four Articles all reflect of how the EU institutions may protect and promote the common values in the Member States, in particular in the context of the ongoing constitutional crises in Hungary and Poland, but looking also at the medium and long-term efforts the EU is called to put in place to prevent new crises and promote a stronger rule of law culture in the Member States and civil society. This Article serves to place the considerations offered in those four contributions against two backgrounds: the current and evolving state of affairs, in which democratic and rule of law questions seem to emerge more and more strongly; and the institutional and academic debate that has taken place in the last decade. We argue that the Articles of this Special Section bring an original and innovative perspective to the debate, showing that the EU response must be based on a combination of political, judicial and financial tools, and that the EU needs to both try to respond to ongoing crisis and construct a stronger toolkit for the future.

This book reappraises the constitutional fundamentals of EU foreign relations law. The essays in the book examine and reassess the basic principles of EU foreign relations law that have emerged over 50 years of incremental Treaty-based and judicial development and explore the particular character of the EU's \"external constitution\". They have been written against a background of change and debate: the deliberation over the character of the appropriate constitutional framework which has surrounded the drafting of the Constitutional and Reform Treaties, the increasingly cross-pillar nature of much EU external action, and renewed interest in the accountability of foreign relations policy and practice to democratic and judicial review within and without the EU.

The main argument of this article is that the meaning of the national identity clause of Article 4 (2) TEU should be limited to what its text actually states, namely to a guarantee for the constitutional structures of the European Union (EU) Member States. The article rejects the broader meaning often given to this Treaty provision, namely that it offers a kind of generic protection for national diversity and national constitutional values. Such a broader meaning is not needed, since primary EU law contains many other provisions that protect national diversity, all of which have a specific meaning and role in the EU legal order. Giving Article 4(2) the broader meaning is harmful, as it opens the door to abusive and superficial uses of identity as a justification for non-compliance with EU law obligations from the side of the Member States. national constitutions, institutional diversity, cultural diversity, regional autonomy, judicial organization, national languages

The recent evolution of European Union equality law, and the equality law of single European countries, is marked by the increased attention given to the procedural and institutional preconditions for the effective protection against discrimination. In this context, the creation of public bodies specially tasked with the promotion of equal treatment (equality institutions), which used to be a specific feature of only some European countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, as well as some non-European countries such as the United States, is now common all over Europe. The immediate reason for this development is that equality institutions have been imposed on all EU Member States by means of a series of EU directives in the early years of this century. From a comparative law perspective, we can observe here an interesting example of legal transfer which leaves much room for bricolage at the national level, and has given rise to a hybrid legal regime which combines legal rights with softer mechanisms of governance.

This introductory article lays out the background of the inquiry proposed by the contributions of this special issue, while also presenting its main findings and adopting a forward-looking stance. To this end, it first briefly recalls what the origins of the identity clause are, before it discusses what meanings this clause could have. Subsequently, the main conclusions of the various articles are presented. The final part concludes by restating that national identity remains an undefined concept, which can only be defined on a case-by-case basis by means of dialogue between national and European courts. National identity – constitutional identity – constitutional courts – European Court of Justice – judicial dialogue