This article examines how EU rights and laws serve as legal opportunity structures for women’s rights activists in Europe. Further, it examines what effects this transnational activism has on the permanence and inclusion of public interests and gender equality in EU legal and political processes. The analysis examines the legal domain of EU women’s rights over a thirty-year period. Methodologically, the study relies on case law analysis, primary document collections, and interviews with non-governmental organizations and governmental elites at both the EU and the national level. I ask how legal mobilization can serve as a catalyst for institutional change (by influencing litigation and legislative action), and how this effects subsequent EU-level women’s rights mobilization and public inclusion.

Response of national highest courts to the ECJ's integrationist agenda – Logic behind qualified acceptance of EU law supremacy and direct effect – Several possible explanations for the observed inter-court variation: the courts’ type and organisation; their power to review legislative acts under domestic law; the rules governing access to the judicial forum; the monistic tradition of the legal system and the level of public support for European integration – Assessment of empirical validity of these hypotheses using a new dataset coding the doctrinal positions and institutional constraints of 34 domestic highest courts – Most correlations small – Only one variable – the power to review statutory legislation under national law – appears to have a significant influence on the courts’ doctrinal response to legal integration – Some support for the argument that the varying institutional constraints and incentives under which highest court judges operate shape the way they accommodate and reconcile two conflicting goals

Habermas's normative vision – Strengths and deficiencies – European Union democracy as solution to global problems – Necessity of developing a European civil society – Normative ideal, functional mechanisms, empirical reexamination – Habermas's criticism of Euro-skeptics – Substance-through-procedure mode of social integration – Adequacy of procedural substance questioned – Empirical limits to Habermasian European Union democracy – ‘Multi-segmented governance’ in the European Union – Supranational redistribution? – Legal integration has not facilitated social integration – Scharpf, Weiler, Joerges, Schmitter – Habermas's Sozialstaat principles jeopardized on Union level – Structural obstacle to coordinated European social welfare policy – European politics will resemble Sektoralstaat – Participation, egalitarianism and accountability