The continuing importance of the study of comparative constitutional law – A European perspective – The Venice Commission and international monitoring of national constitutional systems – Authoritarian tendencies and the European Constitutional Heritage – Interpretation and application of constitutional provisions depends on the context – Comparative law as a common endeavour of judges, lawyers, and scholars

Introduction – Explaining party bans, political and legal contexts – Banned parties and banning states in Europe, the political context – Nature of banned parties – Nature of banning states – Tolerant and intolerant democracies, the legal context – Evolving rationales for party bans and procedures for proscription – Contemporary rationales for banning parties – Anti-democratic ideology – Non-democratic internal organisation – Party names – Party orientation to violence – Protecting the present order – Evolving rationales for party bans – Weimar and legitimacy paradigms – Conclusions, directions for future research

EU budget – Founding vision of budgetary integration – Budget of citizens and not only of states – Corrections, rebates and national net balances – Convention on the Future of Europe – Comprehensible and transparent budget as a prerequisite for democratic legitimacy – Treaty of Lisbon reforms – Post-Lisbon fragmentation leading to a ‘budgetary galaxy’ – Differentiated budgetary integration likely to endure – Final Report of the Monti High Level Group on Own Resources – Necessity for future reforms to take account of the broader galaxy – Return to a citizen-oriented approach – The Union method

Boundaries: between public and private law – Political dimensions of private and public law – Boundaries between domestic law and transnational and international law – Boundaries between law and other disciplines, including economics, comparative politics, normative political theory, and hermeneutic disciplines – National styles of comparative law scholarship – Analytic and pragmatic traditions in comparative law scholarship

Gap between the EU’s normative commitments to socio-economic justice and the practical workings of its integration project -- Potential for strengthening the social EU by recourse to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union – Charter normatively commits EU to a constitutionally conditioned Internal Market – Charter curbs property rights and entrepreneurial freedom specifically for the sake of social rights guarantees – Constructive response to legitimacy dilemmas emerging from cases such as Laval, Viking and AGET Iraklis – Reinstating socially embedded constitutionalism at EU levels as an alternative to relegating social integration to national levels

EU Law–Vertical competence review of EU secondary law–Court of Justice control of the exercise of EU legislative powers–Strict procedural review of EU legislation–Standard of judicial review and intensity of judicial review–Judicial review as a safeguard of federalism–Constitutional review of EU legislation–Proportionality, subsidiarity and principle of conferral–Balance between the EU legislator’s prerogatives and the need to ensure that EU legislation conforms to the precepts of EU law–Distribution of competences between Member States and the EU

An assessment of the balance between ‘the market’ and ‘the social’ by reference to the areas of social policy, the internal market and economic governance – Imbalance resulting from a consitutional displacement of the legislative process (EU and national) and instead decision-making by the judiciary and the executive – Proposals to address the imbalance by reinforcing the role of the EU legislative process and limiting other forms of European integration.

European Court of Justice – European Parliament – Accountability through the budgetary process – Fostering the European Court of Justice’s democratic legitimacy through financial accountability – Accountability for how the European Court of Justice organises the institution and conducts its procedures – Efficiency versus quality as yardsticks to assess the Court’s performance – The European Parliament’s ambivalent practice of focusing solely on judicial efficiency – Proposals how the Parliament could take the quality of the European Court of Justice’s judicial process into account when assessing the Court – A different use of judicial statistics – Inciting quality-oriented reforms such as the introduction of amicus curiae participation and bilingual (French/English) deliberations

European Ombudsman – Free access to information in the EU – Regulation No 1049/2001– Standard of assessment used by European Ombudsman – Legal norms versus norms of good administration and whether good administration can be understood outside legality – European Code of Good Administrative Behaviour and the rather ambiguous concept of maladministration – European Ombudsman as developer of norms of good administration in the area of free access to information – A rather limited role as developer of norms of good administration for the European Ombudsman in individual decisions – Role in ‘translating’ the case law into somewhat more accessible jargon and explaining how existing principles and norms of good governance apply to the circumstances of a specific case – Own inquiries as a policy instrument for advising EU institutions and agencies on how to deal with certain aspects pertaining to access to documents and transparency – Interesting interplay between European Ombudsman and the courts

Constitutional right to social assistance in Italy – Lack of a universally-accessible, albeit conditional and means-tested, scheme against absolute poverty – Separation of powers – Textualism – Framers’ original understanding – Living constitutionalism and courts’ relationship with public opinion – Italian, EU and international constraints on citizenship and duration-of-residence requirements – Fiscal sustainability

Horizontal effect of fundamental rights – Legal principles – Dichotomy between private and public law – Systemic or anti-systemic elements in legal orders – Conflict between contractual autonomy and fundamental rights – Coherence in law – Balancing – Cases of permissibility of bank charges in the Czech and German legal systems – General clauses on good morals and good faith in private law

EU external relations law – Court of Justice of the European Union – Common Foreign and Security Policy – Judicial actors – International courts – Jurisdiction – EU law – Primacy – Damages – Infringements – Direct actions – Preliminary references – the Opinion procedure – Staffing – Future scenarios

Fundamental rights – EFTA Court – Multilevel normative frameworks of human rights protections – General and unwritten principles of EEA law – Impact of the EU Charter on EEA fundamental rights – The European Convention on Human Rights as the dispositive normative basis for the EFTA Court’s resolution of a case – Fundamental rights operationalising the principle of homogeneity between EEA and EU law – Restriction of a fundamental freedom to further an aim based on fundamental rights.

Belgian Constitutional Court – Conflicts between regions, communities and the central government – Allocation of competences – Decisions with high political content – Degree of political alignment between the parties in litigation and judicial behaviour at the Court – Empirical testing – All decisions of the Belgian Constitutional Court, 1985-2012 – Alignment between the alleged political preferences of the judges and the political affiliation of the Petitioner increases the rate of success of the latter

Judicial independence – Judicial accountability – Court presidents – Judicial politics – Separation of powers – Court administration – Judicial councils – Selection of judges – Czechia – Central Europe

Judicial cooperation – Italian Constitutional Court – National Constitutional Courts’ attitude towards preliminary reference to the European Court of Justice – First and second preliminary reference of the Italian Constitutional Court in indirect proceedings – Constitutional review of national legislation inconsistent with EU law – Relationship between EU law and constitutional concerns – Added value of Constitutional Courts in protecting constitutional identity – Multilevel protection of fundamental rights – EU Framework agreement on fixed-term work and European Court of Justice case law – Italian legislation on fixed-term work – Italian legislation on recruitment in State schools – Abuse arising from the use of successive fixed-term employment contracts – Judicial defence of workers’ rights – Cooperation between judges and legislators – Balancing between social rights and budgetary constraints – Mascolo case – Taricco case

Danish constitutional limitations – Entrusting executive power to private entities – Executive power involving coercive measures – A previous assumption – Use of physical force – Private prisons – Constitutional interpretation – Binding constitutional assumptions – Substantive limitations – Organisational limitations – External delegation under Danish administrative law – American constitutional law – Private entities’ fundamental self-interest – Conflicts of interest – Pecuniary or other personal interest – Healthcare legislation – The ministerial system – Democratic and legal liability – Judicial review – Ombudsman supervision – Constitutional organisation of state – The bulk of state executive power – Citizens’ constitutional rights and freedoms