European Union Law

The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 member-states and nearly 500 million citizens, and forms the world’s largest trading bloc.  It also represents the fastest and most ambitious example of legal, economic, and political integration in modern times. With ambition comes risk, however, and the EU is currently facing the most serious existential challenges in its history, with the combined impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, "Brexit," the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in the closing of internal borders for the first time ever, continuing fallout and loss of mutual trust from the Euro crisis, the ongoing migration crisis, and the rise and reelection of semi-authoritarian populist regimes in the two member-states of Hungary and Poland.  This course provides a general grounding in the European Union’s unique legal system and to selected topics of substantive EU law.  In the first three-quarters of the course, we will study (1) the EU's political institutions and its lawmaking processes, (2) the system of legal remedies and the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and (3) the constitutional law of the EU, including (a) the relationship between EU law and the domestic laws of the member states and (b) EU human rights law.  In the last quarter of the course, we will study selected topics of substantive EU law, which may include free movement of goods and persons, competition/antitrust law, and/or the pandemic and populism crises.  Exam.