Why Do Labour Lawyers Ignore the Question of Social Justice in European Contract Law?

Abstract: Over recent years, a heated debate about social justice in European contract law has been taking place. Great emphasis is placed on ideological assumptions. For example, the over‐individualistic interpretation of European private law, its market‐led orientation and the insufficient attention paid to the idea of the protection of the weaker party. This discussion considers the traditional conflict between the meta‐principles of market‐oriented efficiency and solidarity‐based action. The whole debate, it seems to me, now calls for a more rules‐based approach. In endeavouring to validate such an approach, this article starts by illustrating the various facets connected to the theme of ‘European contract law’. Then as a preliminary step, I shall briefly examine the question as to why labour lawyers have remained silent and take no part in the discussion on European social contract law. There is ample reason to believe that the contrary is necessary. It has been generally acknowledged that labour contracts are not outside private law—individual contract law in particular—and that it represents one of the most important examples of long term incomplete contracts. The idea of labour law as autonomous is dead and it appears simple to promote the reintegration of labour law into modern social contract law. In the context of the debate on European contract law, three different strategies can be envisaged to achieve this end. The first strategy tests the degree to which provisions under the contractual regime, not all of which are legally binding, effectively meet the needs of the weaker party in the contractual relationship, in terms of his/her security—what might for short be termed the social validity of the contract regime—(the Principles of European Contract Law, the EU rules affecting contract law, etc which are analysed and proposed in the various workshops that are currently examining them), from the specific point of view of labour law. A second strategy is to codify European or Community labour law. Lastly, another strategy is to introduce an intermediate category of long‐term social contracts. What makes this last trend particularly significant for the future is that today globalisation is progressively diminishing the income earned from labour contracts and in this sense creating insecurity. In a globalised economy, where levels of remuneration are lower than in the past, the individual's sense of security must be ensured also in the context of other social or long‐term contracts (outside the workplace), which enable people to obtain other sources of finance (such as consumer credit, for example), or to make arrangements necessary for living (such as tenancy contracts). A need exists for consumers to be granted similar rights to those which historically have been granted to workers. To take just one example: if the borrower under a consumer credit agreement loses his/her job for objective reasons, or falls ill and is therefore temporarily unable to pay the instalments under the agreement, why should there not be a mechanism which limits the credit‐providing institution from terminating the credit arrangement?     

European Law and International Regimes: The Features of Law Beyond the Nation State

Different forms of law are perceived of as possessing differing degrees of legal quality. A quality continuum suggests itself, running from 'high quality' national law, through to 'lesser quality' European law and to 'low quality' international law. This article seeks to explain the perceived differences in the quality of these laws with reference to legal theoretical perceptions of what it is that constitutes the law's quality. It argues that only a theory of law which identifies the core of the law's integrity as lying in its ability to act as a fulcrum between spheres of social and public discourse and the exercise of power can fully explain the divergence in legal quality between national, European and international law. With specific regard to the quality of European law, it concludes by arguing that it is weakened by its relative lack of social internalisation—in comparison with a higher degree of legal and political internalisation—within the European public.     

The Collective Labour Law of the European Union

Abstract: The collective labour law of the European Union is embedded in a variety of legal measures incorporating principles of collective labour law reflecting national experience. The dynamic of its development has been the spill-over effect of these principles, through their translation into the status of EU law, and their development by decisions of the European Court of Justice. The article outlines a framework of principles which, it is argued, are currently embodied in the collective labour law of the EU. They include collectively bargained labour standards, workers' collective representation, workers' participation, and protection of strikers against dismissal. In addition, there is a parallel principle of collective solidarity emerging in the social security law of the EU. The principle of collective negotiation of labour law introduced by the Protocol and Agreement on Social Policy may be seen as the founding constitutional basis for the collective labour law of the European Union.     

Towards a European Law of Contracts

Abstract: European contract law has recently been the subject of increasing attention and intense debate. In addressing this issue, the following contribution departs from traditional analyses of the necessity, feasibility, and opportunity to harmonise national legislation on contractual relations. Instead, the author seeks to demonstrate that, with the objective of promoting the internal market and developing trade within it, EC authorities have long since given birth to a genuine European contract law. Beginning with the analysis of a body of EC directives, this article argues that the genuine nature of this law can be ascertained despite its limits or rather by taking these limits into account. The important rights granted to different contracting parties (consumer‐purchaser, consumer‐tourist, and certain professionals) stand in contrast to the formal incoherence and fragmented character of the legal texts. The article concludes that, in analysing the notion of European contact law, it is necessary to adapt a functional approach rather than a formal one, because the functional approach has dominated European integration and the European law of contracts since its inception.     

A European Legal Method? On European Private Law and Scientific Method

This article examines the relationship between European private law and scientific method. It argues that a European legal method is a good idea. Not primarily because it will make European private law scholarship look more scientific, but because a debate on the method of a normative science necessarily has to be a debate on its normative assumptions. In other words, a debate on a European legal method will have much in common with the much desired debate on social justice in European law. Moreover, it submits that, at least after the adoption of the Common Frame of Reference by the European institutions, European contract law can be regarded as a developing multi-level system that can be studied from the inside. Finally, it concludes that the Europeanisation of private law is gradually blurring the dividing line between the internal and external perspectives, with their respective appropriate methods, in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, in the developing multi-level system it is unclear where the external borders of the system lie, in particular the borders between Community law and national law. Second, because of the less formal legal culture the (formerly) external perspectives, such as the economic perspective, have easier access and play an increasing role as policy considerations.     

Unravelling the Embedded Liberal Bargain: Labour and Social Welfare Law in the Context of EU Market Integration

European economic integration with a minimalist social policy at EU level was in part made possible by strong domestic labour market and social welfare institutions. The main contention of this paper is that EU market liberalisation was embedded within institutions of social citizenship at domestic level, which served to counter the liberalisation of the internal market. But this settlement has been put under strain. In addition to the challenges posed to the sustainability of European welfare states by the global economic crisis, the internal market jurisprudence of the Court of Justice casts doubt on the sustainability of the ‘embedded liberal bargain’. This paper focuses on the role of the Court, in particular in its jurisprudence on the interaction between (EU) market freedoms and (national) labour law, which undermines the ability of states to retain their regulatory autonomy over labour or social welfare law and, arguably, speeds up the unravelling of the ‘embedded liberal bargain’.     

EMU and the Shift in the European Labour Law Agenda: From ‘Social Policy’ to ‘Employment Policy’

This article examines the interaction between EMU and the European Union (EU) employment strategy and its implications for law. It focuses on the importance of EMU as a catalyst in the development of the EU's social and employment policy in the years following the Treaty on European Union in 1992, up to the inauguration of a new employment policy in the Treaty of Amsterdam. In analysing the EU's discourse on labour market regulation, it is arguable that a shift has occurred in the EU's position on the ‘labour market flexibility’ debate: that the EU institutions are more readily accepting of the orthodoxy that labour market regulation and labour market institutions are a major cause of unemployment within EU countries and that a deregulatory approach, which emphasises greater ‘flexibility’ in labour markets, is the key to solving Europe's unemployment ills, along with macroeconomic stability, restrictive fiscal policy and wage restraint. As the EU's employment strategy has matured, this increased emphasis on employment policy has come to displace discourses around social policy. This change in emphasis has important implications for EMU since it signals a re‐orientation from an approach to labour market regulation which had as its core a strong concept of employment protection and high labour standards, to an approach which prioritises employment creation, and minimises the role of social policy, since social policy is seen as potentially increasing the regulatory burden.     

Constitutionalism,populism, and the imaginary of the authentic polity: a socio-legal analysis of European public spheres and constitutional demoicratization

The sociology of constitutionalism emphasizes the duality of constitutions as both power limitations and power enhancements. Following the socio-legal perspective, this article focuses on the constitutional imaginary of the public sphere and distinguishes it from the imaginary of the authentic polity, in which the constituent power of the people is protected against the corrupting effect of representative institutions and technocratic bodies. The promise of authenticity is behind the recent resurgence of populism and the constitution of what Zygmunt Bauman describes as ‘explosive communities’. The final part of the article focuses on the transnational politics and law of the European Union (EU) and discusses its possible responses to the imaginaries of constitutional populism – most notably, the emergence of European public spheres and demoicracy. Without the constitutional imaginaries of an anti-explosive transnational and democratically constituted community, further enhancement of the power of EU institutions will always lead to populist backlash at the national and local levels of its member states.     

Sociological interpretations of legal development

This paper seeks to outline some ways in which sociological inquiry has helped to interpret general processes of legal development. It comments on a few aspects of a vast subject. Furthermore, it was commissioned in a specific context of debate: as part of an agenda of discussion of the relative merits and potential of sociological and economic analyses of law. Hence, to provide a setting for what I try to argue about the character and value of sociological interpretations of legal change, it seems appropriate to preface those arguments with some general ideas about the nature of sociological inquiries in legal contexts and about perceived contrasts between the orientation of these inquiries and what I take to be certain orientations in economic analysis of law. Accordingly this paper is in two parts. The first offers a few prefatory remarks on the character of theoretically guided sociological inquiries about law (sociology of law). The second discusses various kinds of interpretation of legal development, which have been offered from the perspectives of sociology of law.     

An Exercise in Legal Honesty: Rewriting the Court of Justice and the Bundesverfassungsgericht

This article contains an urgent plea for the re‐establishment of legal honesty in Europe. European law is a victim of European economic crisis. The emergence of the concept of conditionality within national and European jurisprudence, or the judicial imposition of a market discipline upon national budgets, is also a part of a chronicle foretold given in the face of the volatile power of international finance markets. Yet, in rewriting the judgements given by the Court of Justice in the case of Thomas Pringle and by the German Constitutional Court in its matching jurisprudence on the European Stability Mechanism, this article seeks to overcome the destruction of constitutionality within Europe, the foreclosure of a European space for the politics of alternatives and the condemning of individual Europeans to lasting suffering within a perpetual austerity regime.     

Law's Polyarchy: A Comment on Cohen and Sabel

This comment links Cohen/Sabels' idea of a 'directly-deliberative polyarchy' to the contemporary debate on the deficit in democratic legitimation of the European Union. Within this constitutional-legal debate the conventional options are either to defend a vision of the EU which separates global economic law from national sovereignty, and thus relies on the legitimising powers of free markets, or to regard the legitimation problem (at least under present conditions) as beyond solution: that is to say that any further progress towards an 'ever closer union' would inevitably increase the legitimation deficit, and to suggest that the capacity for political action of the nation state should be protected or restored. This comment seeks to show that the concept of a 'directly-deliberative polyarchy' offers an attractive alternative to these traditional positions because it breaks the stranglehold of the false dichotomy 'global market vs national democracy' and thus permits an extension of the idea of radical democracy to European Supranationalism.     

Social Insurance Monopolies in Community Competition Law and the Italian Constitution: 'Practical' Convergences and 'Theoretical' Conflicts

An Italian judge, following earlier suggestions of the national antitrust Authority, has referred to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling under Article 234 EC Treaty two questions on the interpretation of Articles 81 and 86 of the EC Treaty. With those questions, raised in an action brought by a self‐employee against the Istituto Nazionale per l'Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (INAIL) concerning the actor's refusal to pay for social insurance contributions, the Tribunale di Vicenza has in summary asked the Court of Justice whether the public entity concerned, managing a general scheme for the social insurance of accidents at work and professional diseases, can be qualified as an enterprise under Article 81 EC Treaty and, if so, whether its dominant position can be considered in contrast with EC competition rules. This article takes this preliminary reference as a starting point to consider in more general terms the complex constitutional issues raised by what Ge´rard Lyon‐Caen has evocatively called the progressive ‘infiltration’ of EC competition rules into the national systems of labour and social security law. The analysis is particularly focused on the significant risks of ‘constitutional collision’, between the ‘solidaristic’ principles enshrined in the Italian constitution and the fundamental market freedoms protected by the EC competition rules, which are implied by the questions raised in the preliminary reference. It considers first the evolution of ECJ case law—from Poucet and Pistre to Albany International BV—about the limits Member States have in granting exclusive rights to social security institutions under EC competition rules. It then considers specularly, from the Italian constitutional law perspective, the most recent case law of the Italian Constitutional Court on the same issues. The ‘contextual’ reading of the ECJ's and the Italian Constitutional Court's case law with specific regard to the case referred to by the Tribunale di Vicenza leads to the conclusion that there will probably be a ‘practical convergence’in casu between the ‘European’ and the ‘national’ approach. Following the arguments put forward by the Court of Justice in Albany, the INAIL should not be considered as an enterprise, in line also with a recent decision of the Italian Constitutional Court. And even when it was to be qualified as an enterprise, the INAIL should in any case be able to escape the ‘accuse’ of abuse of dominant position and be allowed to retain its exclusive rights, pursuant to Article 86 of the EC Treaty. This ‘practical convergence’in casu does not, however, remove the latent ‘theoretical conflict’ between the two approaches and the risk of ‘constitutional collision’ that it implies. A risk of a ‘conflict’ of that kind could be obviously detrimental for the European integration process. The Italian Constitutional Court claims for herself the control over the fundamental principles of the national constitutional order, assigning them the role of ‘counter‐limits’ to the supremacy of European law and to European integration. At the same time, and more generally, the pervasive spill over of the EC market and competition law virtually into every area of national regulation runs the risk of undermining the social and democratic values enshrined in the national labour law traditions without compensating the potential de‐regulatory effects through measures of positive integration at the supranational level. This also may contribute to undermine and threaten, in the long run, the (already weak) democratic legitimacy of the European integration process. The search for a more suitable and less elusive and unilateral balance between social rights and economic freedoms at the supranational level should therefore become one of the most relevant tasks of what Joseph Weiler has called the ‘European neo‐constitutionalism’. In this perspective, the article, always looking at the specific questions referred to the Court of Justice by the Tribunale di Vicenza, deals with the issue of the ‘rebalance’ between social rights and economic and market freedoms along three distinct but connected lines of reasoning. The first has to do with the need of a more open and respectful dialogue between the ECJ and the national constitutional courts. The second is linked to the ongoing discussion about the ‘constitutionalization’ of the fundamental social rights at the EC level. The third finally considers the same issues from the specific point of view of the division of competences between the European Community and the Member States in the area of social (protection) policies.     

The Impact of European Integration on Private Law: Reductionist Perceptions, True Conflicts and a New Constitutional Perspective

If private law is defined simply as a matter of core areas such as substantive contract, torts, property or family law, it may be doubted whether European law has significantly affected national private law systems; or conversely, whether national private law is relevant to European integration. However, this paper argues that such conclusions are misleading: while there have been very few European interventions into the core areas of civil codes or the common law, the integration process has impacted forcefully upon deeper structures of national legal systems. Challenging the institutional embeddedness of national private law, European primary and regulatory law has remodelled (public) concepts of private autonomy, the realm of private governance and the social responsibility of private actors. How then to present and evaluate this indirect impact? Drawing upon concrete examples, this paper seeks first to understand this European challenge to the interdependence of national private law, borrowing from political science's analytical tool of multi-level governance to highlight the complex interrelations between European rights and regulatory law and national private law; and secondly attempts actively to assess the legitimacy of the impact of integration upon private law with the aid of the explicitly normative theory of deliberative supranationalism. However, precisely because Europe remains in a state of flux, and dependent upon contingent political processes, no final conclusions are drawn: as is the case with so many areas subject to integrationist logic, the contours of the ‘new European private law’ cannot be laid down in advance, and are instead a long and weary matter of cooperation and fine-tuning between national and European judiciaries.     

Crime and the EU's Constitutional Future in an Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice

Abstract: The European Union is finalising negotiations in respect of a constitution that will define its identity and future. The draft constitution begins with a quote from Thucydides ‘Our constitution . . . is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the greatest number’. 1 In this article I look at the proposed constitutional framework of the European Union from the perspective of the gradual realisation of measures in criminal law capable of affecting the lives of individuals. The central question is to what extent the Union is providing itself with the tools to achieve democratic exercise of the power to maintain order and to punish individuals within a single area of freedom, security, and justice. Within the draft constitution an ambiguity arises as regards the principles which underlie this part of the project: mutual recognition and approximation. Mutual recognition of national decisions maintains power within the borders of the state, approximation leads towards a consolidation of power. The extent to which the constitution pulls in two rather different directions and the consequences for the individual are examined here.     

Taking the Law Seriously: On Political Science and the Role of Law in the Process of European Integration

Abstract: The interdisciplinary discourse on European law seems paradoxical. While the editors of this Journal plead for a contextual jurisprudence, political scientists are discovering the importance of law for the integration process. This article explores the merits and problems of both of these shifts¹. On the one hand, it points to implicit assumptions of legal arguments that need to be contrasted with the insights of political sciences into mechanisms of integration processes and the functioning of inter-governmental bargaining - and is thus to be read as an appeal for a 'contextual' jurisprudence. On the other hand, it argues that political science analyses, even when they take the legal dimension of European integration into account, tend to rely upon an instrumentalist view of the legal system which fails to acknowledge the Law's normative logic and discursive power. This theoretically complex argument is exemplified first by an analysis of the tensions between the legal supranationalism of the European Court of Justice and the German Constitutional Court's defence of national constitutionalism, already intensively discussed in this Journal². What the article adds is an extension of the constitutional debate to the economy. It argues that Europe cannot, and should not, be based upon a dichotomous structure of (national) political rights and (European) economic liberties.     

Reassessing the Feminist Theoretical Project in Law

This article seeks to address the current state of theoretical debate within feminist legal studies in the United Kingdom and beyond. It is part map, part critique of dominant theoretical trends – an attempt to identify and explore a range of questions about feminist scholarly engagement in law, including the relationship between academic feminism and political activism, the distinction (if any) between 'feminist' analyses and broader engagements with law and gender, and the normative underpinnings of feminist legal scholarship. The author makes no pretence to neutrality on these issues, questioning the perceived 'drift' between political and academic feminism, and arguing strongly for the recognition and realization of feminism's normative and transformative aspirations. Similarly, she challenges the emergence of an 'anti-essentialist' norm in feminist discourse, and reaffirms the value of 'women-centred' feminist approaches. Finally, this article is also a personal venture, a 'stock-taking' exercise which seeks to interrogate the author's own understanding of what feminist legal work entails.     

Acquiring a Community: The Acquis and the Institution of European Legal Order

Abstract: The theme ‘law and disorganised civil society’ raises the fundamental question concerning the junction between legal order and disorder, hence the passage from instituted legal order to the institution of legal order. The emblematic manifestation of this passage, in the framework of the European legal order, is the acquis communautaire: what is the nature of the process that leads from acquired community to acquiring a community? In a first, preparatory, step, it will be argued that determinate conceptions of truth, time and the giving and taking of reason underlie the process of acquiring a European community. These findings are confronted, in a second step, with Antonio Negri's theory of the multitude as a constituent power, which opposes revolutionary self‐determination to representation. Deconstructing this massive opposition, this paper explores three ways in which representation is at work in revolutionary self‐determination. As will become clear in the course of the debate, instituting (European) community turns on the interval linking and separating law ‘and’ disorganised civil society.     

Dismantling or Strengthening Labour Law: The Case of the European Court of Justice

Abstract: The European Court of Justice is increasingly accused of dismantling labour law. The unusually sharp criticism is mainly motivated by four determining, though concealed reasons. First, the fact that many decisions address conflicts familiar to national law which are however largely repressed in the national context; second, the crisis of the national labour markets and the ensuing attempts to fence them off from the consequences of advancing integration; third, the inconsistent policies of a Union caught between the prevailing orientation towards a distinctly economic Community and the demands of a slowly progressing political Union; and fourth, the Union's difficulties to meet its own claims. As a result, the Court of Justice is more and more distracted from its judicial role and forced into a regulatory function. Hence, it is important to recall that a consistent integration process inevitably requires abandoning national regulations and creating a growing body of common rules intended to realise the common objectives. Further, the Union must more than ever attempt to correct its structural deficiencies and lay down fundamental rights, both in order to give direction to its regulatory interventions, and to limit them. Finally, the time has come for a clear specialisation of the European Court of Justice itself, as well as a systematic review of the conditions governing preliminary rulings, in order to avoid any further instrumen-talisation of the Court for the solution ofinternal conflicts of the Member States.     

The Function of the Proportionality Principle in EU Law

In this article the author assesses the proportionality principle in EU law from a legal theoretical and constitutional perspective with the aim of discovering the function of the principle. Having first discussed the implications of the proportionality principle being a general principle of law, and what function it has—namely to secure legitimacy for judicial decisions—the author suggests that there are several ways in which the principle can be interpreted. There is, nevertheless, a limit to this interpretation determined by the proposed function of the principle. In the third part of the article, the European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) interpretation of the principle is assessed. The assessment clearly shows that the ECJ is interpreting the principle in different distinguishable ways. The question could, however, be raised as to whether the ECJ in some areas is interpreting the principle in a way that undermines the very function of it.     

A 'European' Conception of Legal Consciousness: Rediscovering Eugen Ehrlich

This paper discusses the present ‘legal consciousness’ literature and seeks to identify two different conceptions of legal consciousness. Most of this literature originated in the United States, but there has also been a growing interest in issues of legal consciousness in Europe. The use of the term ‘legal consciousness ’ in these European discussions is, however, remarkably different from its use in the United States literature. It is argued that the most commonly used ‘American ’ conception of legal consciousness reflects important ideas of Roscoe Pound and asks: how do people experience (official) law? By contrast, a European conception of legal consciousness, which was first introduced by the Austrian legal theorist Eugen Ehrlich, focuses on: what do people experience as ‘law ’? After both perspectives are applied in a case‐study of a run‐down neighbourhood in the Netherlands, it is concluded that future studies of legal consciousness may benefit from an integration of the two conceptions.