EU Rule of law crisis – Article 2 TEU – EU values – EU fundamental rights – Freedom of speech – Member state courts – Interpretation of national law in conformity with Article 2 TEU values – Preliminary reference – Duty of referral – Criminal liability of judges – Reverse Solange – ASJP judgment – Judicial applicability of Article 2 TEU – Value-oriented interpretation of EU law – Mutual Amplification – Essence of EU fundamental rights – L.M. judgment – Aranyosi judgment – Federal balance – Red lines – Systemic deficiencies – Solange presumption – Mutual trust

Separation of institutions, functions and personnel – Checks and balances – Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia – Short tradition of separation of powers in Central Europe – Fragile interwar systems of separation of powers – Communist principle of centralisation of power – Technocratic challenge to separation of powers during the EU accession – One-sided checks on the elected branches and empowering technocratic elitist institutions – Populist challenge to separation of powers in the 2010s – Re-politicising of the public sphere, removing most checks on the elected branches, and curtailing and packing the unelected institutions – Technocratic and populist challenges to separation of powers interrelated more than we thought

Mutual trust – Essence of EU fundamental rights – Values under Article 2 TEU – Intrinsic link between essence and values – Federalism – LM judgment – Rule of law crisis in Poland – Right to fair trial – Judicial independence – Fundamental right to an independent tribunal – Prohibition on transfers – Obligation to presume compliance with fundamental rights – Condition of ‘systemic deficiencies’ as a federal safeguard – Area of Freedom, Security and Justice – European Arrest Warrant – Dublin system

Popular sovereignty translated as unfettered constitutional-amendment power – Weakness of constituent power as justification for unfettered amendability – Alternative concept of sovereignty as unaccountability of constituted power – Popular sovereignty as unaccountability of the referendum verdict – Sovereignty emerging at end-point, not inception of constitutional-amendment process

Interrelation between economic and political dimensions of constitutionalism – European market integration and erosion of democratic representation within Member States of the EU – Regulatory externalities between national democracies – European market citizenship and its ramifications for democratically legitimate exercise of the power to tax – Underinclusiveness of domestic democratic process – Political representation beyond the state – European economic constitution as a source of political empowerment and the EU economic freedoms as political rights – The European Court of Justice as a protector of representation – Reinforcing political participation through regulatory competition – European market freedoms enhance representation but at the expense of political equality – Economic freedoms as insufficient means of political empowerment – Improving democratic representation and equality beyond the state requires properly political citizenship instead of mere market rights

The founding of Russia’s 1993 Constitution undermined its transformative potential – The use of pre-existing Soviet legality during Russia’s 1993 founding period encouraged President Yeltsin to push through a constitution that would ensure presidential dominance over the legislative branch – This presidential centralism has hindered the realisation of the transformative potential of the other parts of the constitution – Any future turn to transformative constitutionalism in Russia will require weakening the power of the Russian presidency – Transformative constitutionalism depends as much on the actual process of constitutional foundation as the text of the constitution

Populist politicians have to deal with a foundational paradox, i.e. ruling without being contaminated by the corrupting influence of power - Strategies to shield populists’ political actions from the accusations that populist parties have flung against pre-existing elites – The Italian Five Star Movement as a populist political discourse resorting to legalist strategies – Legalism as a way of introducing political reforms as mandatory actions, required by some sort of exclusionary, pre-existing legal rule rather than the product of ideological confrontation and political compromise – Populism as an anti-political response to factionalism – Lottery system, absolute neutrality and the end of politics

European Court of Justice – General Court – EU procedural law and practice – Procedural rights of the parties to judicial proceedings before the EU Courts – Participation of the parties to judicial proceedings and the legitimacy of judicial decisions – Accuracy of decision-making, the right to a hearing and procedural economy as guiding values of EU procedural law and practice – Different procedural practices of the General Court and the Court of Justice – The filtering of appeals by the Court of Justice – The accountability of the EU Courts for their procedural law and standards

Legal constitutionalism – Political constitutionalism – Emergence of illiberal constitutionalism as a tertium genus – Examination of constitutional courts under three illiberal governments: Poland, Hungary, and Turkey – Illiberal governments’ strategies to seize control of constitutional courts – Illiberal governments’ aim to secure leverage over constitutional judges and restrict the powers of review of the court – Constitutional courts under illiberal rule invert the traditional functions that were assigned to them under the original Kelsenian approach – Instead of a check on power, illiberal constitutional courts become a device to circumvent constitutional constraints and concentrate power in the hands of the ruling actors.

The rise of populism in Central and Eastern Europe as a broader democratic crisis – Developments in Hungary, Poland and Romania indicate failure of representative politics post-1989 – Reorienting politics towards a deliberative democratic culture can help answer the bottom-up critique exploited by populists – Citizen-centric deliberative approaches take seriously long-standing discontent with liberal democracy and can provide an alternative to populism

Alternative dispute resolution procedures before the European Court of Human Rights – The state agent, a member of the executive branch, tasked with representing the respondent state – Judicial and legislative branches of the respondent state limited or bound by concessions by the state agent – Convention framework effectively increases the power of the executive branch to the detriment of the other branches of government in the respondent state – Tension with national separation of powers – Possible solutions on a national and international level

The Swedish supreme courts as part of the public administration, rather than as independent actors – Political, legal, and administrative reasons behind this positioning – A recent trend shifts the position of the supreme courts – Endogenous forces (e.g. a more ‘conflictual’ political climate) and exogenous reasons (e.g. the increasing importance of the judicial-made EU law) – Swedish supreme courts nearer to being a body with the primary duty of safeguarding the law against the executive and legislative powers – ‘Full’ positioning of supreme courts within the judicial core not an essential institutional requirement for a democracy – Important role of the public administration’s degree of dependence on the legislative power

Interrelations between EU law and domestic law – Concept of a norm-based compound structure – Intertwinement of legal norms and legal orders – Combined normativity – Multi-level structure within the legal norms – Primacy, supremacy and ranking of EU law and domestic law – Structural principles guiding the relationship between EU law and domestic law – Principles of uniformity and constitutional identity

European Court of Human Rights – Protocol No. 16 – Advisory Opinions – Managing backlog – Unpredictable effects – Complex judicial dialogue – Interplay with preliminary rulings of European Court of Justice and national constitutional courts – Bosphorus presumption – National courts in charge of judicial diplomacy – Increased burden for national courts

Procedural rationality review – Quality of law-making – Fundamental rights – Relation to margin of appreciation – Guidelines to avoid the use of double standards

Internal judicial independence as a new element of the case law of the Strasbourg Court on Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights – The Court has only found violations of internal judicial independence in cases against former communist countries – Relevance of the case law for other member states of the Council of Europe – Internal judicial independence as part of the requirement of an impartial tribunal? – Importance of the independence of the individual judge

Counter-revolution by law in Hungary and Poland – Populism as a distinctive political project that mobilises anti-liberal conservative forces in society – Populist attempt to dismantle liberal-constitutional institutions in the name of a conservative, illiberal project – Populist critique of legal fundamentalism, understood as an excess of liberal legal norms, as a key dimension in the conservative, populist project