The EU and its Sovereign Debt Programmes: The Challenges of Liminal Legality

Abstract

This analysis focuses on the challenges the EU sovereign debt programmes raise for our understanding of legality in the EU by developing in particular the idea of liminal legality. Liminal legality, in the sense I develop it here, concerns legal issues awaiting legal location within one or more legal orders. I consider how long, and through which kinds of practices, do EU institutions allow unresolved legal spaces in the sovereign debt programmes to endure or re-emerge. This entails assessing the various EU judicial pathways through which sovereign debt programmes have been challenged. By stressing the temporal dimensions of liminal legality and the importance of viewing law as a practical enterprise, my analysis suggests that a narrowly doctrinal approach to recent cases such as Ledra Advertising, Mallis and Florescu does not capture the problematic dimensions of legality in the EU sovereign debt programmes.