Articles for category: AAA General

Anatomy of a Fall

On 11 February 2025, the Commission published its 2025 work programme and revealed the likely withdrawal of the Proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Liability Directive (‘AILD proposal’), citing “no foreseeable agreement” among Member States. This blog post highlights the proposed AILD’s main merits and shortcomings and it explores the implications of its likely withdrawal for EU tech regulation by clarifying the interplay between AI liability rules, the AI Act, and the PLD.

6. Mai 2025

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What is Citizenship For?

Last week, the CJEU declared Malta’s citizenship for investment scheme incompatible with EU law. Setting aside the evidently highly questionable quality and defensibility of the Court’s legal reasoning, the decision clearly casts Union citizenship as a status constituted by meanings and norms specific to the European Union as a normative legal project. What are we to make of this conception of citizenship, and its use by the Court to strike down citizenship for investment schemes?

6. Mai 2025

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Trump 2.0 as ›Dual State‘?

Donald Trump’s radicalized efforts to transform US constitutional democracy into personalized executive-centered rule have again generated a predictable avalanche of invocations of Carl Schmitt. Less predictably, recent political commentators have turned to one of Schmitt’s contemporary critics, the mid-century socialist jurist and political scientist, Ernst Fraenkel, claiming that his account of the Nazi “dual state,” in which rule-based normative and discretionary prerogative legal spheres uneasily coexisted, provides a useful template for making sense of Trump 2.0’s highly selective rendition of legal fidelity.

6. Mai 2025

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Why bother with legal reasoning?

Hindsight can make one look naive. Following the Opinion of Advocate General Collins in Commission v Malta, I argued that ‘the rhetorical battle over citizenship by investment has been won by the EU institutions’ but that ‘emotions and rhetoric alone should not decide legal battles’. Of course, I should have known better: the central dogma on which a large lineage of EU citizenship cases rests – that EU citizenship is destined to be the fundamental status of nationals – is a rhetorical device without basis in EU law. And once again, in the Commission v Malta ruling of 29 April 2025, on whether Malta was in breach of its obligations under EU law by maintaining and promoting a citizenship by investment (CBI) scheme, the Court prioritised rhetoric and political expediency over solid legal argumentation.

5. Mai 2025

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EU Citizenship’s New Essentialism

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the Maltese citizenship by investment violates EU law. The Court thereby hints – for the first time – that EU citizenship bond is not only legal in nature. Citizenship has suddenly become a legal but also some other connection between a person and the state. In other words, the law is not enough to make one a citizen, as any such citizenship might fall short of ‘solidarity and good faith’ test at the EU level. This newly-invented extra-legal rule put thousands of Europeans in limbo. This blog will locate some key steps marking this development and offer a possible presentation of the recent decades of EU law in three broad steps, to show how we got where we are.

5. Mai 2025

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Criminalising Boycott Calls

Can a call for boycott ever amount to hate speech? In an era of deepening political divides, the question is increasingly influenced by geopolitics rather than human rights law: The Turkish government's criminalization of boycott calls in response to protests against political repression highlights the dangers of weaponizing hate speech laws, echoing a global double standard that undermines the universal application of human rights protections.

2. Mai 2025

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All This for »Primacy«?

There is hardly any clearer picture of the “tragic” pitfall in which the EU languishes than the last evolutions of the rule of law’s saga, the most recent of which is the C-448/23 case pending before the ECJ. The AG’s Opinion delivered on March 11th shows signs of the decline the EU suffers for the multiple crises occurred and for its reluctance to tackle politically, and open-mindedly, the manifold interrogatives that follow.

1. Mai 2025

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Elisabeth Mann Borgese

In public international law circles, especially those indulging in the law of the sea, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, the youngest daughter born to German Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann in 1918, is perhaps best known for her pioneering work on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Her convictions and contributions to the UNCLOS focused on social justice, equitable access to resources, and environmental protection. By offering a glimpse into her contributions to the UNCLOS, this post highlights how Elisabeth Mann Borgese’s ideology – influenced in part by her cautious feminist beliefs – permeates her legacy.

30. April 2025

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