European Law Journal最新文献

Gender disparities persist across all EU Member States, despite legal frameworks that formally guarantee equality between women and men. This article explores how deeply entrenched social norms can undermine the efficacy of legal norms, focusing in particular on the domain of gender equality. Grounded in legal theory, the analysis argues that legal noncompliance is often not the result of institutional failure alone, but of conflicting social expectations that remain deeply internalised and largely unchallenged. The first section clarifies the conceptual distinction between the efficacy and effectiveness of legal norms, with attention to their design and conditions of enforcement. The second develops a typology of ways in which social norms obstruct the implementation of gender-equality law, illustrated with examples from EU Member States. The third section provides an analytical overview of how conflicting social norms undermine the efficacy of gender-equality law. Finally, the article adopts a static theoretical lens to examine how law might respond to such conflicts—not by prescribing specific reforms, but by identifying the conceptual conditions under which legal intervention can become both normatively justified and practically feasible.

EU childcare leave law and policy have traditionally been shaped by concerns relating to gender equality and work–life balance. Conversely, the rights of the child remain largely marginalised in this context, which may result in unequal access to childcare leave among children. Against this normative backdrop, the present paper explores the meaning of equality and non-discrimination between children in relation to childcare leave. It argues for a robust and purposive application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights to ensure that children's rights are mainstreamed in all the acts of the EU institutions as well as those of the Member States when they are implementing EU law. In particular, Articles 20 and 21(1) are important to secure equal access to childcare leave for all children.

The European Pillar of Social Rights revamped the debate on Social Europe, simultaneously sparking conversations about a European social citizenship, although this remains negatively conceived as primarily reserved for (active) mobile citizens. We argue that the current approach to European social citizenship is biased by a justiciability axiom, which displays a disappointing social scene at the EU. Whereas we do not disagree with this, we argue that an important bulk of what makes rights ‘rights’ is being overlooked: instrumental resources that act as facilitators for accessing social entitlements. We illustrate this point with two examples: the European Equality Bodies and the European Labour Authority. We find that the EU plays a greater role than often accounted for in ensuring that social rights are accessible. While these channels alone are not sufficient for a fully-fledged social citizenship, they can still play an important role in the construction of Social Europe.

While legal scholarship has consistently lamented the lack of recognition of intersectional discrimination in courts, the question of whether intersectionality features in lawyers' litigation strategies remains in a blind spot. Although a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship probes how legal mobilisation shapes the construction of EU law, the role of critical theory in EU legal entrepreneurship has attracted relatively little attention. This article thus displaces the focus from the judicial reception to the litigation of intersectionality. Through a series of interviews and doctrinal analysis, it examines the mobilisation of critical epistemologies in the framing and litigation strategies of norm entrepreneurs in the field of EU equality law. It explores how intersectionality is seized by legal practitioners, transformed as it enters the repertoire of law and rights, and incorporated in litigation strategies to contest, transform and construct non-discrimination law before the Court of Justice of the EU.

While abortion regulation may formally escape European Union competence, EU self-restraint may be under growing pressure. An EU common abortion policy may not be far-fetched, as impulses that trigger interest in abortion increase in Europe and beyond. In examining a recent series of European Parliamentary resolutions on abortion, this article shows how abortion has moved from the margins to the centre owing to increasing triggers coming from inside and outside the EU. In pushing abortion higher up the agenda, the European Parliament has framed abortion in human rights language and, most recently, called for abortion to be included as a right in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The article argues that in adopting these resolutions, the Parliament may be exercising internal cultural diplomacy in human rights and, at the same time, projecting an image of EU unity while marking a binary division of the world: one moving towards more liberal abortion rules and the other towards greater restrictions.

This paper examines the EU's legal framework on the posting of workers—most notably Directive 2018/957—in light of the broader structural tension within European integration between economic freedoms and social protection. It argues that, although the revision marks a shift towards a more worker-oriented approach, the underlying legal and political conflicts remain unresolved. Through an analysis of case-law, legislative developments and empirical trends, the paper shows how the posting regime, while seemingly narrow in scope, acts as a magnifying glass for deeper questions about the EU's identity, legitimacy and capacity to realise the vision of a ‘highly competitive social market economy’ enshrined in Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). The paper concludes that while recent reforms represent a step forward, they also reveal the limits of EU-level regulation in balancing market integration with effective labour protections.

What are the potential strengths and weaknesses in the current reconstruction of foresight at the EU level? In questioning foresight's institutionalisation processes from both a historical and a political sociology perspective, the article claims that charting the future is an issue of political power and that, hence, foresight's institutionalisation can never be taken for granted. More precisely, we identify two factors that determine how such process plays out. First, it depends on the definition and importance of the future according to specific contexts (war, economic or health crisis, periods of growth, etc.). Second, this changing definition intertwines with socio-institutional structures and agents that are crucial for this institutionalisation to be sustainable. The analysis is twofold. First, we provide an overview of past international experiences of projections into the future (both foresight and forecast). Second, we illustrate how these issues may resurface and rebound within the EU’s unique power context.

While in Poland the October 2023 elections led to a government halting the rule of law crisis, in Hungary the political situation continues to deteriorate. Focusing on European Parliament resolutions, this article analyses Hungarian developments from the prism of human dignity, the EU's first foundational value under Article 2 TEU. First the article discusses the key features of human dignity with reference to the original commitment to human dignity under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the EU Charter. Secondly, it uses these key features as an analytical grid for evidencing the construction of a counter-model of human beings made to live in a society of inequality and exclusion. Finally, this paper outlines five reasons why human dignity as the first Article 2 value is breached by the Hungarian regime and why the EU Commission's decision not to trigger Article 7(2) is so problematic.

Drawing on examples of foresight projects situated at the interface between academia and foreign policy practice, this article reflects on the role of academics in informing the practice of foreign policy-making in the EU. The study explores why academics have rarely engaged in foresight over the past two decades and why this has changed in recent years. It argues that this shift is triggered, on the one hand, by the strategic blunders of the last decade and, on the other hand, by the conceptual developments within the disciplines of political science or international relations. After demonstrating the growing trend of scholarly engagement in foresight with a series of illustrative examples, the article discusses the added value and limitations of academic-generated foresight for EU foreign policy. Taking these into account, the analysis indicates best practice solutions, such as foresight exercises, with the joint involvement of researchers and policymakers.

Introducing this issue, the present article notes how the growing political importance given to foresight in EU governance has so far only sparked limited interest among scholars of EU law and policy-making. To address this gap, the article starts by clarifying concepts and defining the key terminology at the intersection between (strategic) foresight and EU governance ‘in the law’ (involving societal actors in law-making processes) and ‘through law’ (governmental actors steering society via law). It then offers a comparative discussion of the main insights of the contributions to the issue, highlighting how and why foresight has become institutionalised and how it operates across EU institutions today. In the concluding section, the article turns to the future and calls for more research into how foresight shapes EU governance, setting a research agenda for the study of foresight as a practice informing law- and policy-making in the European Union.