Month: January 2019

Tasked with enforcing the rights derived from EU law in Member States, national judges play a critical role in the process of European integration. However, we still know very little about how European law shapes the functioning of EU Member States’ judiciaries, say Urszula Jaremba and Juan A. Mayoral. In their article “The Europeanization of national judiciaries: definitions, indicators and mechanisms” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Urszula and Juan offer three solutions to foster our understanding of the Europeanization of national judiciaries: a conceptualisation of Europeanization that captures the attitudes and profiles of national judges, a range of indicators that allow us to measure changes in attitudes and behaviour among national judges, and a distinction between utility-driven and socialization mechanisms that can explain these changes. Due to its complexity, mapping the effect of EU law on Member States’ courts is an ambitious exercise. Taking a step towards achieving this goal, Urszula and Juan’s contribution “opens up a whole new stream in the socio-legal research agenda that is crucial for a more comprehensive understanding of the processes of Europeanization of national courts.”

Ever since expanding supranational environmental policy in the 1980s, the EU has carefully crafted a reputation as a global environmental leader. Yet, a series of recent academic contributions claim that the post-2009 economic recession and a growing sense of Euroscepticism across Member States have left their mark on the EU’s environmental policy ambition. In their article “EU environmental policy in times of crisis” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Charlotte Burns, Peter Eckersley and Paul Tobin analyse whether the past decade’s conglomerate of crises has effectively dismantled the EU’s environmental policy ambition. Identifying all environmental legislation proposed and adopted by the EU between 2004 and 2014, Charlotte, Peter and Paul show that the EU’s environmental policy output indeed dropped in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 economic crisis. Notwithstanding this short-term effect, evidence from interviews with 35 policy-makers in Brussels suggests that other factors, including an increasing diversity among EU Member States and the maturity of the acquis communautaire, played a much more consequential role in the slowing down of the EU’s environmental policy ambition. The evidence presented in Charlotte, Peter and Paul’s contribution challenges perceptions “of a crisis ridden Union intent upon rolling back its environmental ambitions, but of a surprisingly resilient environmental policy actor that in the face of enormous challenges managed to keep the show on the road.”

Existing research has provided ample evidence that in globalized markets, regulatory policies introduced by influential states often diffuse to other jurisdictions and stoke policy change beyond their own borders. In his article “Victims of their own success abroad? Why the withdrawal of US transparency rules is hindered by diffusion to the EU and Canada” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Bjorn Kleizen argues that the diffusion of regulatory rules can come back to bite legislators seeking to change them in their original jurisdiction. Bjorn provides an in-depth case study of the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw payment transparency regulations for extractive industries, which had been introduced by the previous U.S. administration. He shows that the EU and Canada’s decision to emulate Obama-era practices meant that U.S. oil, gas and mineral multinationals were still faced with disclosure rules pursuant to EU and Canadian law, undermining the effectiveness of U.S. lawmakers’ attempts to reduce the regulatory burdens. Bjorn’s argument suggests that when “states co-operate to create rules that are applicable to each other’s companies, the layering of these various rules may create a difficult-to-remove multilateral framework.”