With the increasing environmental degradation in spaces most affected by climate change such as the Arctic, and the extension of anthropogenic environmental problems even into the Earth’s orbit, international law is confronted with some unprecedented challenges. Much of the legal dialogue surrounding this question is taking place in the abstract, such that there are no exact proposals for methodological and practical applications in lawmaking. In this Article, I argue that current governance relevant to the Arctic and outer space precedes an understanding of these spaces. Critical posthumanism, and other approaches, point out the continuation of strict boundaries that have been set up between the human body and the environment. International law’s formalist doctrinal deductions exacerbate these boundaries. I propose an approach to lawmaking under a broad term: the cosmolegal. The cosmolegal proposal challenges distinctions between human-made and non-human “laws”—scientific and social laws—and questions the foundational determination of both. The framework I suggest in this Article, therefore, requires a new approximation to accuracy in lawmaking, which could be achieved by greater interdisciplinarity and acceptance of ontological pluralism. This Article is divided into two broader sections. The first section focuses on two environmental problems: A) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the Arctic and B) orbital debris. The second section argues for a different ontology of law and human self-understanding in the context of the unknown. It proposes “cosmolegality” in an attempt to approximate the inclusion and representation of ‘everything considered to be non-human.

Acknowledging the exponential growth and global dimension of climate litigation, this introductory piece to this Special Section starts by situating this phenomenon in the context of the scholarly debate on polycentric and multi-level climate governance. It highlights both the strategic use of climate litigation as a tool to establish responsibilities and push for a more ambitious mitigation and adaptation agenda, but also as an opportunity to better understand the role of courts in public policy governance. The second part of the article then proceeds to discuss the main findings arising from the various contributions grouped in this section, and concludes by arguing that further research is needed in order to properly understand the role and contribution of climate change litigation to transnational climate governance.

This Article uncovers the normative political theory underlying the legal doctrine of constitutional pluralism, as it is used in the EU today. Constitutional pluralism, once described as a semi-official legal doctrine in the EU, is now being used by some member states to challenge its authority and rules. By reconstructing the political thought of one of its founders, N. MacCormick, this Article takes issue with two most common interpretations of constitutional pluralism: On the one hand, it has been claimed that the normative political content of constitutional pluralism is virtually identical, or at least compatible, with that of Kantian rights-based cosmopolitanism; on the other, it has been contended, especially with regard to its uses in Hungary and Poland, that it was an inherently dangerous, illiberal, normative theory. This Article offers to move away from current legal debates to go back to the origins of constitutional pluralism. It argues that constitutional pluralism is not a purely liberal theory indeed. But neither is it inherently illiberal. Rather, both liberal and illiberal readings are possible, but partial, interpretations of MacCormickian constitutional pluralism. A more systematic interpretation shows that constitutional pluralism opens a path to move beyond this somewhat archetypical divide.

In recent years, no area of criminal law has received more public attention than the laws on sexual violence. Discussions about the need for reforms have exhibited a mobilizing force extending far beyond the legal community. From a legal perspective, these discussions concern intricate normative questions regarding the content of the right to sexual autonomy and the suitability of the consent paradigm to establish the limitations of its protection under criminal law. At the same time, they ultimately concern the question of gender-related societal power hierarchies. Acknowledging these broader socio-political dimensions allows us to comprehend the highly contentious manner in which this debate is often conducted. This Special Issue attempts to analyze from a transnational perspective both the fundamental legal and socio-political questions in the current discussions on sexual violence and criminal justice. A recurring theme is the question as to whether criminal law can be used not only as an instrument of repressive social control, but also as a means of power-critical – even emancipatory – social policy.

This Article analyzes the potential impact of the European Commission’s proposed “European Green Deal” on labor rights, in particular the rights of workers in lower-income EU Member States. It focuses on environmental measures, already part of the EU’s existing environmental policies and further contemplated in the Green Deal, which prohibit or tax certain polluting production processes. Such measures, insofar as they apply uniformly to traded-good industries, are likely to make firms in lower-income EU Member States less competitive and harm their workers’ rights to work and to fair wages. Thus, even though these environmental measures are worth pursuing for the benefits they procure, the distribution of their costs is likely to run afoul of egalitarian norms. This Article puts forward an institutionalist approach to trade theory which recognizes that competitiveness is legally constructed. It argues on the basis of that theory that lower-income countries should be allowed to adopt ambitious industrial policies and subsidize their firms to insulate workers from the disruptions caused by added environmental regulatory costs. More broadly, this Article presents an agenda to pursue radical environmental transformation while remedying, or at least not worsening, inequalities between workers and citizens in the EU.

This Special Issue aims at interrogating the judicial and extra-judicial challenges that arise from the EU complex administrative framework, which can be characterized as both multi-level—arising from the vertical cooperation between EU and national authorities—and cross-level—arising from horizontal cooperation between national authorities themselves. It starts from the premise that there may be decisions affecting natural and legal persons which cannot be easily reviewed judicially, whereas in extra-judicial cooperation, the lack of common standards or practices across Member States may undermine the effectiveness of EU policies and objectives. This Special Issue focuses on various mechanisms of horizontal and vertical cooperation, such as regulatory patterns giving rise to transnational administrative acts and mutual recognition systems, case studies of composite procedures in the field of the genetically modified organisms regime and information sharing in asylum policy, as well as multi-level inspection activities for the enforcement of EU law. It further complements the analysis on the judicial challenges arising from those cooperative structures with an examination of extra-judicial avenues of control in the EU administrative framework, namely the “EU queries” process and the cooperation of ombud offices, as well as the audit of the EU budget. This Special Issue reflects on ways to overcome the current challenges of, and seeks to prompt further research on, the multi-layered EU system of administrative cooperation.

This Article aims to examine the social media jurisprudence of national courts in a selected set of EU Member States by focusing on judicial dialogue specifically via references to the case law of other courts. Do judges in social media cases engage with the case law of peers, and if so how and to what extent? The analysis investigates whether national judges draw on the jurisprudence of higher domestic courts, foreign courts and/or European supranational courts—the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)—and explores the use of such jurisprudence. It is based on 147 cases from the constitutional and/or supreme courts of Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Although judicial dialogue is generally limited in the cases under study, the analysis illustrates the different ways in which courts interact with the rulings of peers and informs on the latter’s contribution to judicial assessment.

This Article aims to reimagine post-national legal solidarity. It does so by bringing debates over Habermasian constitutional theory to bear on the evolving use of mutual recognition and mutual trust in the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice (AFSJ), particularly in the context of European asylum law and reforms to the Dublin Regulation. Insofar as critiques of Habermasian “constitutional patriotism” apply to the principle of mutual trust, the Article suggests why post-national solidarity requires fallibilism and dynamic responsiveness that exceed formalized rules of forbearance and respect.

On this revised view, legal solidarity guarantees a particular form of adjudication through which individual litigants in a particular case challenge the transnational structural conditions that give rise to individual harm. Because it acknowledges that violations of individual rights are always potentially or in part the result of a collective systemic failure, this conception of solidarity restores meaning to the transformative “transfer” of sovereignty that post-national law had promised. In the field of asylum law, I detail how this application of solidarity would offer a much-needed corrective to structural imbalances in the existing Dublin regime. I conclude with reflections on the principle’s application in additional fields of EU law, as well.

The Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) in Germany has issued a landmark ruling with regard to climate change. It opens its jurisprudence for a new dimension of human rights: The intertemporal guarantee of freedom. It argues that the legislature has violated fundamental rights by failing to take sufficient precautionary measures today for the time after 2030. The emissions allowed in the Federal Climate Change Act until 2030 will nearly exhaust Germany’s remaining CO2 budget. After 2030, drastic legislative measures, which curtail nearly all activities that emit CO2, might be necessary. If emission reductions are delayed until 2030, the costs of climate protection will increase for future generations, and with it the risk that emission reductions will only be possible at the price of serious losses of freedom. Therefore, the legislature needs to act now and take the time after 2030 into consideration. The order might eventually influence climate change litigation in other areas of the world. The article will demonstrate the main arguments of the FCC order. The combat of climate change is an international task, which cannot be solved by Germany alone. The FCC takes this fact to some extent into account. It argues for international cooperation to combat climate change. Unfortunately, it does not fully evolve a jurisprudence which takes the core principle of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) seriously and addresses the questions of equity. The CBDR principle is one of the core principles which should solve the North-South divide and which should bring together the efforts of rich as well as poor countries to combat climate change. It is enshrined in the Paris Agreement. The FCC engages with this principle on the surface but misses the opportunity to truly and deeply engage.

This Article undertakes the conceptual analysis of the right to breathe clean air, concentrating predominantly on the perplexities of this highly important environmental right. In its first part, this Article brings forward a few aspects illustrating general ambiguity and imprecision of the right. As will be shown, it is quite troublesome to firmly indicate which foundations (legal v. moral) or character (individual v. collective) the right to breathe clean air has, as well as to which category (generations of human rights) it belongs to. Similarly, its temporal determination (present-day v. future) is uncertain, and it is easy to confuse or conflate the substantive right with procedural rights. In the second part, this Article identifies and describes more serious and specific difficulties surrounding the right, which negatively influence conceiving the right to breathe clean air as a legal right. In the beginning, the reference is made to its nonautonomous character. Subsequently, this Article explores the issues of the content of the right, outlining problems with the meaning, the indeterminacy of the subjects of the said right, and its absence at the international level. Finally, this Article highlights hurdles concerning the enforceability of the right. This Article concludes that, at present, it is troublesome to conceptualize the right to breathe clean air as hard law, however, the situation may change in the future.

During the 20th century, society’s view on sexualities has undergone a severe paradigm shift. While moving away from ideas of decency and bawdiness to evaluate legitimate sexuality, concepts of autonomy and consent gained importance. This transformation is also challenging the law.1 With the broad acceptance of various forms of sexual behavior and sexual orientation, legal regulation based on morality and ethics is outdated. Recent debates on law and sexualities focus on sexual autonomy and its conditions. This is shown especially by the legal debate on sexual violence and criminal law.2 But the right to sexual autonomy does not only require adequate protection against sexual violence. As a human right, it obliges State Parties to Human Rights Treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to respect, protect, and fulfill sexual autonomy. This includes the guarantee of freedom from sexual violence, coercion and discrimination, as well as control over one’s own body and over the involvement in sexual interactions with others. In order to ensure the different components of sexual autonomy, sexual education and reliable access to information and medical services are necessary. This paper presents an approach concerning the multifaceted dimensions of sexual autonomy through a human rights lens.

In times of digital pervasion of everyday life, the EU has strengthened a normative idea of European fundamental rights, especially by referring to a strong notion of privacy protection. A normative corridor is evolving with the “right to privacy” at its heart, a right that will be instrumental in shaping the European legal architecture’s future structure. In this Article we argue that the constitutional protection of privacy rights is not only of individual relevance but also of major democratic significance: it protects the integrity of the communication structures that underpin democratic self-determination. The debate on privacy protection, however, often lacks a democratic understanding of privacy and misses its public value. Following an interactionist understanding of privacy and a discourse-theoretical model of democracy, our argument puts forward a conceptual link between privacy and the idea of communicative freedom. From this perspective, the substantiation of a European fundamental right to privacy can be seen as a possible contribution to promoting European democracy in general.

In this Article we argue that rule of law indices are a powerful tool to detect ills in the rule of law of EU Member States. In order to explain how to improve the indices’ potential, we give a critical overview of the methodological issues of the four rule of law indices which we consider particularly instructive for our purpose. These are the indices provided by the Freedom House (“Freedom in the World,” FIW), the Bertelsmann Stiftung (“Bertelsmann Transformation Index,” BTI), the World Bank (“Worldwide Governance Indicators,” WGI), and the World Justice Project (“Rule of Law Index,” WJP RLI). After analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of these indices, we turn to the EU Justice Scoreboard (EUJS). While the introduction of the EUJS in 2013 has already been an important step in order to lay the ground for an EU-wide analysis, in this Article we suggest how the EUJS should be further developed into a proper rule of law index by aggregating expert opinions into a single number. This would make the EUJS a significantly more useful tool in the ongoing EU rule of law crisis.

This Article deals with the issues related to the judicial review of transnational acts which are adopted particularly within the context of the European integration process. The European Union is a privileged playground for the development of administrative acts of this type, primarily because of the existence of various and diverse administrative cooperation mechanisms. Transnational administrative acts are, either because of their adoption process or because of their conditions of enforcement, governed by at least two national legal orders. The question of the availability of judicial review in the context of transnational administrative acts is a complex one, because the presence of one exogeneous element may disrupt the straightforward path toward the right of access to courts—as both the determination of the competent court and the scope of the review carried out by the court seized become uncertain. This Article first draws up a typology of transnational administrative acts. Second, on the basis of this typology, this Article analyzes the solutions developed by the case law of the Court of Justice and assesses them in the light of the principles of territoriality of administrative law and the right to effective judicial protection.

This article offers an opening to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) situation and attacks against the judiciary in this region since 2010. The focus is not primarily on historical path dependence like the rest of this issue. Instead, the focus aims at the nature of attacks on the judiciary. Such attacks have appeared in CEE and the US in recent years. Its interest lies in explaining similar patterns visible in the judiciaries of CEE. Particularly, it looks at the current conditions in the Czech judiciary, political interventions in Poland since 2015 and in Hungary since 2010, and undermining of trust towards judiciary in the U.S., where attempts for delegitimizing the judiciary have happened since 2016. The article draws on similarities of attacks of authoritarian governments and responses of judiciaries. The authors highlight similarities and diversities of CEE countries 30 years after the fall of the communist regime and a path of these resemblances and varieties.

This Article explores both theoretically and historically the core features of authoritarian adjudication. It attempts to offer an ideal type of what could mean a full assertion of authoritarianism in the context of adjudication. It aims to do so by first highlighting the value of insights that critical legal history can bring to the current discussion of populism. Second, it explores the paradigm of the exception that it aims to revise and ground in a historical analysis of the interwar period. Third, it considers the intellectual and practical lines of continuity between current reactions to the pandemic and the historical role of the military in modernity by drawing on the example of Romania. In a final part, it provides a reflection on the confusion between law, politics, and military concerns as a specific feature of modern authoritarianism.

European Union legislators, CJEU judges and EU law scholars have produced streams of texts which determine both what EU law is and how it is perceived. We explore what these distinct “voices” tell us about the EU’s legal and policy priorities using a mega corpus compiling more than 200,000 legislative acts, 55,000 court rulings and opinions, and 4,000 articles from a leading EU law journal. Applying an unsupervised machine learning technique known as probabilistic topic modelling, we find that economic integration remains the focus of EU law, but that scholars tend to emphasize rights issues more and ignore certain topics, such as farming regulations, almost entirely. The relationship among these partly interdependent, partly autonomous voices, we suggest, can be conceptualized in terms of co-evolution. Legislation influences issue attention on the CJEU, which, in turn, influences what law professors choose to write about.

The right to effective judicial protection is driving to a significant evolution of EU administrative law, especially in view of the multijurisdictional nature of the European administrative structure. This Article focuses on gaps in judicial protection arising from mutual recognition in transnational interactions between the administrative authorities of the EU’s Member States. It first sets the ground by examining the ingredients of the equation: The fundamental right to effective judicial protection, the concept and forms of mutual recognition, and the notion of European administrative space. Next, this Article assesses the judicial protection that private parties can obtain from national courts in these transnational scenarios. Procedure, substance, and deference are separately explored here, in order to draw out blind spots and deficiencies, as well as to suggest possible solutions to address at least some of them. This Article ends with a brief summary of the main findings.

National sovereignty has been the key consideration for basing judicial cooperation in the European Union on mutual recognition. More than one decade after the creation of the Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ), this contribution assesses whether mutual recognition-based EU legislation in civil and criminal law indeed respects national sovereignty. To this end, it studies the Framework decision on the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), the EU’s flagship instrument in the AFSJ. We distinguish two elements of national sovereignty: (a) the protection of the State and its basic structures (its statehood); (b) the State’s values, principles and fundamental rights (its statehood principles), and assess the EAW from a dynamic perspective: from its initial inception, in which mutual trust primarily implied little interferences with the laws and practices of issuing states, to the current state of affairs which is marked by what could be called a ‘mutual trust supported by harmonization’- approach. Especially in the judge-driven harmonization of the EAW and the dialogue between judicial authorities we witness important (and oftentimes overlooked) elements that impact national sovereignty. At the end, the findings of the article are put in the context of the current rule of law crisis in the EU.