In following the interdisciplinary spirit of this symposium, I emphasise the usefulness of the sociological approach of interpretivism, together with qualitative methods, by examining how EU legal actors perceived the Eurozone crisis and how they enabled policy solutions: financial assistance and policy conditionality. This case constitutes a legal conundrum because of how these solutions encompass and connect different forms of law – EU law, international law and private financial law – and how EU lawyers seek to protect the EU legal order from this hybrid arrangement by drawing the arrangement as closely as they can to the EU legal order. This in turn creates issues of accountability as the imposition of policy conditionality engenders litigation by EU citizens who were directly affected therein, raising the question of whether establishing liability for damages is possible in such a hybrid arrangement. Using interviews with legal actors and observations of court proceedings, I foreground the multiple meanings of EU law and explain how such an approach can expand our understanding of not only what EU law means to its practitioners, but also how these meanings give insight into the potential paths of EU law’s development. To interrogate these multiple meanings, I examine the crisis policy solutions as well as a set of court cases – Ledra Advertising, Mallis and Chrysostomides – that sought to hold the EU accountable for losses suffered because of these policies. Using these methods can partially overcome the opaqueness of judicial proceedings at the EU level, as well as give insight into the development of the legal arrangements being contested in court. A novel methodological element is the descriptive analysis of observations of court proceedings in Chrysostomides, where I demonstrate how the interactions between the lawyers and the judges shed light on how legal actors establish legal validity as a collective project.

The aim of the contribution is to focus on the conflicts arising between climate-related renewable energy goals vis-a-vis environmental protection interests. To this effect, the analysis will firstly investigate the origin of such types of conflicts, which may also be named intra-environmental conflicts, and define their main characteristics; secondly, the regulatory choices made by the RED II and the RED III Directives to manage these conflicts will be presented and compared, with a particular focus on the three key features of the recently approved RED III Directive; thirdly, an alternative approach to address such types of conflicts will be proposed. This is based on the principle of integration, to be interpreted with an ecological sustainability reading of the principle of sustainable development.

Insights from Social Network Analysis reveal that the structure of the social network surrounding international courts is important for these courts’ ability to secure compliance with their judgments and by this to initiate social change. International courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) invest growing resources in shaping their networks, recognising that these networks are necessary tools that can help them to influence society. This paper will focus on the ways social network analysis can facilitate a better understanding of the ECtHR. The paper explains how certain characteristics of the network surrounding the ECtHR determine the ultimate social impact of the court.

Community detection is a set of algorithms developed in network science to find meaningful sub-groups within larger groups. This article (1) outlines and evaluates the method and (2) shows how it can enrich ongoing debates about European integration. To this end, it uses the example of the approximation of laws, an enduring topic in European legal studies.

The article analyses the book Economic Constitutionalism in a Turbulent World edited by Skordas, Halmai and Mardikian, criticising the assumptions of societal constitutionalism and ordoliberalism on which it is based. The book concurs with the view that the current crisis of global legal institutions cannot be tackled going back to Nation States. Such an assumption seems to be inspired by societal constitutionalism à la Teubner. In contrast to traditional constitutionalism, which hinges on the dichotomy between constituent and constituted power, societal constitutionalism assigns a central role to independent institutions, whose main function is to avoid any hegemony of one social sub-system over another, in particular of politics over economics. The limit of societal constitutionalism lays in its assumption that the economic sub-system has its own rationality that the political–constitutional system can only irritate, taking for granted that the paradigm of that economic rationality is the one established after 1989, thus implicitly adhering to the neo-ordoliberal vision and legitimising its absolute immanentism. Coming to the materiality of the issues underlying the book, most of the contributions conceive globalisation as an engine for the increase of global prosperity. This confidence rests in the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage. However, the latter is valid only under condition of restrictions on the movement of capital. Another assumption made by several contributions is the theory of the varieties of capitalism, according to which individual models of capitalism tend to stabilise around certain production regimes whose key actors are large firms and business associations. According to an alternative, neo-Kaleckian paradigm, there is no natural convergence of the actors of the economic system towards a mutually beneficial institutional set-up, and it is quite unlikely that, without the external intervention of politics, the system can return to equilibrium.