States as Successful Litigants before the European Court of Justice: Lessons from the ‘Repeat Players’ of European Litigation

This article investigates the relationship between the political preferences of E.U. Member States and the behavior of judges at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) by analyzing their citation behavior. It shows that judges at the ECJ are more likely to cite judgments authored by judges appointed by Member State governments with similar preferences regarding European integration. Analogous with the context of U.S. courts, nonrandom opinion assignment potentially threatens the validity of these results. To overcome this problem, I exploit the unique institutional setting at the ECJ to develop an improved identification strategy that builds on comparing the citations in two documents produced in the same case (i.e., the judgment and the opinion of the Advocate General). The findings in this article provide evidence for the hypothesis that the political preferences of Member State governments are reflected in the behavior of the members of the ECJ.

Disharmonization in the Regulation of Transgenic Plants in Europe

This Dissertation studies the jurisdiction of European and national courts over the rights of the consumer of air traffic. The Dissertation has highlighted the role of the European Court of Justice in protecting the rights of consumers of air traffic. The role of the European Court of Justice is to interpret the law and to ensure its uniform application in all EU Member States. The EU Court of Justice also resolve the legal disputes arising between the national governments of the Member States and The European Court of Justice. In addition, it has the right to penalize airlines for violating passenger rights. The Dissertation also highlighted the role of national courts in protecting the rights of consumers of air traffic. The Dissertation has shown that the national courts of the Member States have jurisdiction not only to examine cases but also to engage in judicial dialogue with the European Court of Justice. There are often conflicts between European and national courts. The Dissertation has also highlighted the power of national courts to choose whether to uphold the judgments of the European Court of Justice. Finally, the Dissertation identified that there is harmonization of European and Greek law to protect consumers' rights of air traffic since most European directives have been incorporated into Greek law.

Sweden's state pharmacies may lose hold over drug sales

Can health survive the single market?

The conclusion addresses certain major features of the overall course of European integration in light of the book's priorities and findings, indicating that the book has pursued two main objectives: the first, to demonstrate that the course of European integration has been profoundly shaped by a system of adjudication managed by the European Court of Justice (ECJ); the second, to test a range of propositions about how the legal system operates, and to trace the effects of the ECJ's case law on policy outcomes, and on the policy‐relevant behaviour of nonjudicial actors. In some areas, including free movement of goods and sex equality, judges – not governments or legislatures or the Member States – have broadly determined the paths along which institutions evolved. Judicial supremacy partly inheres in the ECJ's status as trustee, partly in the dynamics of the constitutionalization process provoked by the ECJ in the mid‐1960s, and partly by the propagation and diffusion of specific techniques of judicial governance, such as those associated with precedent‐based balancing standards. Every chapter of the book presents evidence refuting claims that the ECJ and the national courts operate as relatively perfect ‘agents’ of the Member States or national governments, and shows that the activities of supranational organizations such as the ECJ routinely produce ‘unintended consequences, from the perspective of those who have designed and redesigned the EC. The author concludes that he does not see how theories that make predictions about how integration has proceeded from institutional design can be rescued.

This paper considers whether and to what extent the introduction of Union citizenship has contributed to extending the freedom of the nationals of the Member States. The paper first overviews the development of the European Court of Justice (ECJ)’s case-law on the right of free movement of Community workers since the 1960s; then the paper highlights the major ECJ cases dealing with the Union citizens’ right to free movement and residence in the Union since the 1990s. Those cases include Martínez Sala (C-85/96), Grzelczyk (C-184/99), Baumbast (C-413/99), Carpenter (C-60/00), Garcia Avello (C-148/02), Zhu and Chen (C-200/02), Rottmann (C-135/08), Zambrano (C-34/09) and Macarthy (C-434/09). The cases reveal several points: firstly, Union citizens’ right to free movement and residence (Article 21 TFEU) has not contributed to a wider freedom of movement because the Directive 2004/38 has subjected the exercise of the movement/residence right to several economic conditions. Secondly, however, the ECJ has found the basic article that creates Union citizenship (Article 20 TFEU) a different and original role, to ensure continuous residence of the Union citizens even in the Member State of their own under limited circumstances: in Rottman, Zambrano and Macarthy, the ECJ repeatedly emphasized that citizenship of the Union was intended to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member States, and that Article 20 TFEU precluded those measures taken by their own State that had the effect of depriving Union citizens of “the genuine enjoyment of the substance of the rights conferred by virtue of their status as citizens of the Union.” Thirdly, the exact “substance” of a resident Union citizenship is still not clear. Although the national court that referred the Zambrano case to the ECJ indicated the possible interpretation that incorporates those rights listed in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights into the “substance” of Union citizenship, the ECJ did not respond to that specific question. Lastly, it is now clear that EU law on Union citizenship can restrict the Member States’ exercise of immigration control power as long as that power affects the secure residence of any Union citizen of minor age (including the Member States’ own nationals) and his or her family of any (even third country) nationality: the situation that the Member States control their own nationals and third country nationals used to be a “purely internal” situation that excluded the application of EU law. Union citizenship case-law has penetrated into that situation in order to ensure the genuine enjoyment of the substance of the Union citizens’ rights. How far the penetration would extend remains to be seen.

In this Issue

Introduction:The main purpose of this abstract is to raise awareness of the unsatisfactory legal situation with regard to integrated care.The abstract focuses on two major legal issues.First, I picture the actual legal situation regarding cross-border healthcare.Secondly, I describe the duties care providers and patients may face when entering into integrated care programs.Cross-border healthcare: Currently, we lack an European legislative framework that regulates cross-border healthcare.One reason for this fact is that Article 152 EC treaty states that "Community Action in the field of public health shall fully respect the responsibilities of the Member States for the organisation and delivery of health services and medical care" [1].Therefore, it's up to each Member State to provide regulations with regard to cross-border healthcare services.Hence, patients need to deal with various national-often inconsistent-provisions when considering consuming cross-border healthcare.As a consequence, patients easily felt overstrained and the unclear legal situation prevents them from crossing a border to obtain healthcare.This often averts the establishment of integrated care models.As a result, patients lose the opportunity to receive more or different healthcare services and products in Member States other than the State in which they are living or are insured.

Since the 2018 Juízes Portugueses judgment, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has developed a line of case law based on Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) in conjunction with Article 19(1)(2) TEU. These two Articles list the values on which the EU is founded and describe the task and structure of European jurisdiction and the ECJ’s obligation to uphold the law within the framework of the Union Treaties. This new approach, identified as value-operationalizing, enables the ECJ to derive requirements for the independence of national judges from Article 2 TEU in conjunction with Article 19 TEU. The value of the rule of law in Article 2 TEU is thus ‘brought to life’ or ‘operationalized’ in the context of Article 19 TEU. Specific commitments under EU law for the national court organization, a core area of Member States’ competence, now arisen from the value clause of Article 2 TEU. It has been claimed that the ECJ has become the saviour of the rule of law in Member States such as Poland and Hungary. This article aims to investigate the following paradox lying within this case law: the ECJ is attempting to save national judicial independence, yet in doing so it is arguably exceeding its own mandate and acting ultra vires. Thus, paradoxically, the ECJ is encroaching on Member States’ judicial autonomy and undermining its own judicial authority. The article assesses why the wording, systematics and fundamental principles of EU law are violated, using doctrinal analysis and an evaluation of the ECJ’s value-operationalizing case law from the perspective of ultra vires theory. It concludes that establishing common values should be a joint effort. Therefore, the ECJ should not be a quasi-legislator; it should cooperate with national constitutional courts in a reverse preliminary ruling procedure.

DISPUTE BETWEEN THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION AND THE GOVERNMENTS OF MEMBER STATES OVER THE MODEL FOR THE SYSTEM REFORM OF THE ECONOMIC AND MONETARY UNION IN THE YEARS 2010-2023 The primary research objective of the article is to analyze the System Reform of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) from 2010 to 2023 from the perspective of the dispute between the European Commission and the governments of Member States over the model of this reform. The author formulated two research hypotheses. The first one is based on the assumption that the implementation of the reform faced numerous difficulties and barriers resulting from the negative attitudes of the governments of some Eurozone member states towards the implementation of selected projects of the European Commission, but also from the accumulation of several international crises that the European Union was facing at the time. These were the migration crisis in 2015-2016 and then from 2022, the pandemic crisis in 2020-2021 and the geopolitical crisis caused by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine from 2022. The second hypothesis is that the main axis of disagreement between the Commission and the governments of Member States was the limits of financial solidarity and the target System Model of the EMU. Following this, the author formulated four research questions: (1) On which issues did the positions of the European Commission and the Eurozone Summit converge and on which issues did they diverge, and why? (2) To what extent did disagreements between Member State governments over the limits of financial solidarity and the target integration model of the EMU determine the direction of System Reform? (3) How important were the aforementioned international crises for the fate of the reform? (4) What were the main achievements and failures of the EMU System Reform?

MEP warns of growing threat of patient mobility

This chapter provides an analysis of the role of the European Commission and the member states in governing differentiation in European integration - both historically and vis-a-vis the ‘Brexit process’. It ultimately asks how the balance of powers of the Commission and the member states in this regard could evolve in the future. Whereas the administrative capacity of the Commission’s structure and administration are crucial for the implementation of differentiated integration, it is only the EU’s member states’ governments which can provide sufficient impetus - if not legitimacy - for triggering differentiation and thus shaping the future design of the EU. This chapter explores how the institutional dynamics in processes of differentiation have developed over time, assesses the prospective roles that the Commission and the member states could assume in triggering further differentiation in a ‘post-Brexit’ Union, and eventually proposes that coordination and cooperation between the Commission and governments of member states are likely to increase in the future.

How the European Legal System Works: Override, Non-Compliance, and Majoritarian Activism in International Regimes

INTRODUCTION One of the principal constitutional functions of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is to secure legitimacy of the European Union (EU) system of governance by protecting the fundamental values on which this system is said to rest. This role of the ECJ – as a guardian of democracy, fundamental rights and the rule of law – is complicated by the multi-layered nature of the EU's sources of legal authority: the EU institutions and the law-making bodies of Member States (MSs), and by the heavy reliance on the co-operation of National Courts (NCs) in building up and maintaining the EU's legal system. I focus on providing an overview of selected problems that are directly related to the ECJ's legitimising role, and I will do so from the perspective of the ECJ's constitutional politics. First, I will consider whether the alleged prioritising – by the ECJ – of the principles of integrity of the EU legal system and economic regulations over constitutional values – such as fundamental rights and democracy – amounts to an ideological project that undermines the legitimacy of the EU law. I will focus on instances where the ECJ failed to recognise concerns of the NCs related to the standard of protection of these values in the EU law for the sake of protecting its own authority and the uniformity of the EU law. Historically, these concerns were most famously identified in the so-called ‘supremacy’ challenges, but there was also a string of other cases where the protection of market freedoms clashed with fundamental rights and other constitutional principles. Th is period of the ECJ jurisprudence took a more rights-friendly turn in cases such as Omega and Schmidberger . The more recent NCs challenges yet again put the ECJ under pressure, this time because of its reluctance to recognise the higher standards of fundamental rights protection related to criminal trials in national constitutions over those existing in the EU law. The string of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) cases seems to suggest that the ECJ yet again entered a path of prioritising the supremacy of the EU law over substantive constitutional objectives.