Legal Aspects of Withdrawal from the EU: A Briefing Note

Abstract

The withdrawal of the UK from the EU (or ‘Brexit’) as a result of the referendum of June 23 is certain to have profound implications for all aspects of the law of the United Kingdom. As soon as the result became known, legal commentators rushed to offer some kind of guidance. Surprising as it may seem, the pre-referendum debate focused mostly on what the EU is and does. There was very little debate on what the post-EU options would look like. As soon as the result was known, a gap in public awareness on what happens next was immediately evident. A group of academics from the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford met a few days after the referendum to discuss some of the potential legal effects. We decided to publish some of our preliminary thoughts as soon as possible in various blog posts in order to contribute, if we could, to the public debate. We also decided to collect these in a single paper that would become available online on SSRN. The result is a collective briefing note, edited by Pavlos Eleftheriadis, on various legal aspects of withdrawal from the European Union.