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It looks as if Simon Usherwood was asked the same question I was: How to win at Brexit. My answer would begin by taking a step back and loving the bomb. Winning at Brexit is the wrong question. The goal is winning at life. Winning Brexit is simply the best way to do that, but […]
In the last few days, I’ve ended up in Twitter conversations with two British journalists I greatly respect, only to discover that when they look at the EU they see something completely different than what I see. This is not a question of factual knowledge. They know as much about the EU as I do, […]
In defence of my proposed inter-pillar tie-breaker, I remarked that the Treaties have a tendency of being more integrationist – i.e. more inclined towards strengthening European integration – than the Member States, even though the Member States are supposed to be the Maîtres des Traités, the Masters of the Treaties. So I started to wonder: […]
Is it blue or is it a car? This may seem like a strange question, but it is exactly the kind of question that the European Court of Justice was faced with in yesterday’s Commission v. Parliament and Council (Cross-border exchange of information on road safety related traffic offences): Is Directive 2011/82 facilitating the cross-border […]
Verfassungsblog wins the prize for the law geek question of the week/year/decade: Now that the European Court of Justice, in Digital Rights Ireland, has annulled Directive 2006/24, can Sweden get its infringement fine back? After all, in Case c-185/09 (proper judgement in French and Swedish only) the Court found that “by failing to adopt, within […]
Now that all major parties have chosen their nominee for Commission President, it is time for the next question: How can we tell who’s won? Let’s assume that the result is the same as the most recent polls: S&D: 209 EPP: 202 GUE-NGL: 67 ALDE: 61 ECR: 45 Greens: 44 EFD: 31 NI: 92 […]
Last month, AG Cruz-Villlalon published his opinion in the case about the Dutch thuiskopieerheffing, the levy on writable media for the purposes of compensating copyrights holders for legal and illegal private use copying. While the opinion is probably correct, I think there is something very very wrong with it. (The opinion isn’t currently available in […]
I’m still reading the Cohn-Bendit/Verhofstadt book. So far my diagnosis is that, for a book that I fundamentally agree with, there is a lot there that makes me mad. I will blog more about specific annoyances later, time permitting, but I thought I might start by explaining my problems with the book’s excessive pragmatism. Here’s […]
The story of Tonio Borg’s confirmation as the next Maltese Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection keeps getting stranger. In response to the objections in the S&D group, the Parliament has listed a series of commitments that Mr. Borg is to make in order to be confirmed. They are: The delivery of the legislative proposal […]
Parts of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, as well as their civil society supporters, seem to have taken a rather unusual approach to the question of whether the Conservative Maltese Tonio Borg should be permitted to serve as the new Commissioner for Health and Consumer Affairs. In general, their objection seems to be […]
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