Article 6 of the TEU states that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights “shall have the same legal value as the Treaties.” This Article investigates the Charter's real status in the EU legal order. To this end, the Charter's force will be analyzed relative to EU institutions, the Member States, and individuals. The resulting picture will enable consideration of the Charter's place in the EU hierarchy of norms, as well as the question of its primacy and direct effect.

Boosted by landmark decisions such as Crotty, Solange, or Maastricht-Urteil, academic literature on National Higher Courts in the context of European integration has undergone an exponential growth in the last decades. In this Article, I aim at mapping this emerging subfield in order to explore the three patterns that structure it. First, a trend towards the consolidation and expansion of literature on the higher courts of the Member States, which has gained relative autonomy from general studies on European law and politics. Second, a clear tendency towards the internationalization of this subfield, which has developed in parallel to the national scholarship on the topic. And third, the emergence of a pattern of transdisciplinary dialogue in a subfield featured by the diversity of approaches, methodologies, and epistemological backgrounds.

Traditionally in the division of labor between the European level and the Member States it was, roughly, the European legislature that set the norms and the Member States that took care of enforcing these norms. In various policy areas, an implementation deficit has been observed, which is said to be partly due to the Member States facing difficulties with the choice of procedural options. For that reason, among others, the European legislature increasingly prescribes the enforcement approach to the Member States to back up national legislation that implements European law. This Article examines the incoherence of the EU's approach to law enforcement in the areas of consumer, competition, environmental, and insider trading laws. After setting out the EU's legal competences with a view to law enforcement, the rather diverse picture—mixes—of private, administrative, and criminal law enforcement in the four areas will be illustrated. The authors then ask the question of whether this divergence can be explained by an economic reasoning with respect to law enforcement. The analysis, however, identifies substantial differences between an ideal enforcement mix and the current enforcement approaches used in EU law. Moreover, it is suggested that the economic approach could be employed to provide more consistency to the use of enforcement tools in EU law.

The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner, in which the Court invalidated the EU-US Safe Harbour arrangement, is a landmark in EU data protection law. The judgment affirms the fundamental right to data protection in the context of international data transfers, defines an adequate level of data protection, and illustrates how data protection rights under EU law can apply to data processing in third countries. It also raises questions about the status of other legal bases for international data transfers under EU law, and shows that many legal disputes concerning data transfers are essentially political arguments in disguise. The Schrems judgment illustrates the tendency of EU data protection law to focus on legalistic mechanisms to protect data transfers rather than on protection in practice. The EU and the US have since agreed on a replacement for the Safe Harbour (the EU-US Privacy Shield), the validity of which will likely be tested in the Court of Justice. Regulation of data transfers needs to go beyond formalistic measures and legal fictions, in order to move from illusion to reality.

Since December 18, 2014, when the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its notorious Opinion 2/13, the conclusions of the Court have been a subject of numerous analyzes and debates—often sharp in their criticism. Now that the content of the Opinion seems fairly elucidated, the scholarly attention should turn towards searching for practical solutions to the CJEU's demands. This Article aims to provide a list of possible solutions to each requirement of the Opinion and assessing their pros and cons. Instead of concentrating on the obstacles posed by the Court, it is incumbent to address the problems with innovative legal thinking and save the project of the EU acceding to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

This paper analyzes the possible impact of TTIP's so-called regulatory cooperation on the implementation of the precautionary principle in the EU. The European Commission argues that regulatory cooperation will not impinge on the application of the precautionary principle because, first, it does not change the legislative framework of precautionary legislation and, second, the right to regulate will be safeguarded by the TTIPs horizontal chapters. On the contrary, I argue in this paper, that these guarantees are insufficient. Given the methodological and institutional constraints presented by the TTIP's institutional design, in the long run, regulatory cooperation will undermine the precautionary approach to regulation in the EU.

This paper explores a novel equality mainstreaming tool in EU spending—the “ex-ante conditionality”—as introduced in the 2014–2020 European Structural and Investment Funds. It shows that conditionality is a response to the modest achievements of prior equality-mainstreaming action in spending, but that its current legal construct and operation risk propagating similar shortcomings. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of mainstreaming as a crucial tool for progressive achievement of equality and social justice in the EU, and highlights four essential elements to be addressed for a successful equality mainstreaming policy in EU spending.