On June 1st, Polish voters rendered a fateful decision in the presidential election. Karol Nawrocki narrowly defeated Rafał Trzaskowski, the pro-European mayor of Warsaw. Nawrocki’s victory carries profound implications for Poland’s domestic trajectory. Moreover, despite what some commentators have argued, the new president might also well pose a threat for the European Union.
Fünf Fragen an Till Patrik Holterhus
As EU officials arrive in Sofia to celebrate Bulgaria’s readiness for euro adoption, nationalist-fueled protests erupt in the streets. The tensions were triggered by President Rumen Radev’s unexpected call for a referendum on whether the country should join the euro on 1 January 2026 – despite Bulgaria having met all convergence criteria after years of effort. Far from a genuine democratic impulse, the move appears to be a populist gamble, trading legal commitments and European credibility for short-term political gain.
The so-called migrant crisis has been instrumentalized to promote ideas such as “massive invasion” and “the great replacement” – narratives that frame migrants as threats to public security and cultural identity. This rhetoric forms part of a broader phenomenon of othering, in which legal mechanisms are used to exclude and marginalize migrant populations. This text explores how EU migration law actively contributes to this process by reinforcing exclusionary narratives and practices. Drawing on postcolonial scholarship and the concept of borderization, it argues that EU legal frameworks regulate certain groups as undesirable or excessive, echoing colonial patterns of control. These exclusionary dynamics are not merely reflections of societal bias but are structurally embedded in EU law itself.
Donald Trump’s return to the forefront of U.S. politics brings an urgent constitutional question back into focus: Can the American administrative state survive another presidency driven by executive absolutism? Recent developments before the Supreme Court, especially in Trump v. U. S., suggest that long-standing norms and legal safeguards are under siege. This post explores how a second Trump term might exploit structural vulnerabilities in U.S. public law, with consequences that extend far beyond American borders.
The EU’s notion of “safe countries of origin” is on increasingly shaky ground. In a recent Opinion, Advocate General de la Tour suggests that a country can still be deemed safe even when specific groups face serious threats there. This reinterpretation breaks with established case law and risks hollowing out core procedural protections for asylum seekers across Europe. It remains to be seen how this stance will influence the delicate balance between efficient processing and safeguarding fundamental rights.
The study of European Union Law from the perspective of Law and Political Economy (LPE) offers valuable insights from two perspectives. This post shows that on the one hand, LPE as a scholarly movement provides a critical framework for analysing fundamental legal aspects of the EU’s political economy and brings to the debate a much needed renewal of the importance of the critique of the political economy. On the other hand, investigating the EU from a perspective sensitive to LPE analysis is also a potentially enriching challenge for the scholarly movement itself.
What is therefore needed is a much thicker description of the current phase of semantic destabilization. This implies to build a new questionnaire able to grasp the dynamics of contemporary legal controversies allowing to bring historical depth and socio-legal […] While there is certainly a large variety of methodologies able to address this questionnaire, […] I contend however that a socio-genetic approach is better equipped when it comes to unpack the notion of “context” and reconstitute the complex “hermeneutic space” of legal concepts that continuously move back and forth from the legal and the political fields.
On 9 May 1831, a young French aristocrat trained as lawyer arrived in Rhode Island for a nine-months visit to the United States. Officially tasked by the French government with studying the American prison system, his ambition and desire for political and literary fame propelled him to conduct a much broader study of the character of the American Republic. Based on his observations, the young lawyer wrote Democracy in America; a book that holds as much insight about the European Union today as it did about the early American Republic back then.
This post emphasizes the human factor as a critical method of analysis for legal scholars specializing in European Union law. The aim is to critically analyse the evolution of the rules governing the CJEU, shedding light on its composition, organization, and functioning, while also proposing reform initiatives. Some of these reforms prioritize greater transparency within the CJEU. Furthermore, by focusing on the human factor in EU law, this method reveals how individuals are positioned within the institution, helping to identify potential phenomena of invisibility or exclusion in decision-making processes.
13. September 2025
Giovanni Capoccia
12. September 2025
Anne Peters
12. September 2025
Anne Peters