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

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.

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

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

Data retention saga – Interpretative strategy of the Court of Justice – Expansive potential of the principles set by the Court of Justice – ‘Reverse’ effet utile and conflict of competence – EU acts under threat – Domino effect on national security measures – Future scenarios – Twilight of the model of bulk data retention – Modulation of the ban on bulk data retention according to the vulnerability of data processing or depending on the prior unknowability of the threats – Divergence from the European Court of Human Rights – Legitimisation of bulk data retention

‘Equo ne credite, Teucri!

Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’

— Virgil, Aeneid, II, 48-49

Democratic critique of judicial review – A case for judicial review based on democracy – The unsuccessful case against weak judicial review based on democracy – The distinctive democratic qualities of courts – Contestability of political decisions – The argument for weak judicial review implicit in the democratic critique