Carefully structured and supported with a wealth of examples, Elise Muir provides a clear, concise introduction to the EU legal order. Drawing upon her years of teaching experience, Muir outlines the history of the EU, its key actors, modes of action and its daily relevance. Offering students and instructors an up-to-date textbook, Muir pays attention to the latest developments, including the impacts of Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis. Written for students from a range of disciplines and levels of study, this book explains how the EU legal order works. Muir illuminates the complex and technical areas of EU institutional law through explanatory illustrations, schemes, and textboxes. With this engaging and accessible resource, students will be well-equipped to understand the fundamentals and functioning of the EU legal order.

Carefully structured and supported with a wealth of examples, Elise Muir provides a clear, concise introduction to the EU legal order. Drawing upon her years of teaching experience, Muir outlines the history of the EU, its key actors, modes of action and its daily relevance. Offering students and instructors an up-to-date textbook, Muir pays attention to the latest developments, including the impacts of Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis. Written for students from a range of disciplines and levels of study, this book explains how the EU legal order works. Muir illuminates the complex and technical areas of EU institutional law through explanatory illustrations, schemes, and textboxes. With this engaging and accessible resource, students will be well-equipped to understand the fundamentals and functioning of the EU legal order.

This well-constructed, and well-written, collection fills a gap in the scholarship. It offers a rounded and plausible picture of the Court's role in Europe, engaging with the complexity of the law without losing sight of the bigger political picture. Well-contextualised, critical, but nuanced, discussions of the role of rights, economics, science, and institutions, and of the important particularities of EU adjudication, will make this volume unmissable for those interested in the political role of the Court of Justice of the EU.' - Gareth Davies, VU University of Amsterdam, The NetherlandsThis book delves into the rationale, components of, and responses to accusations of judicial activism at the European Court of Justice. Detailed chapters from academics, practitioners and stakeholders bring diverse perspectives on a range of factors - from access rules to institutional design and to substantive functions - influencing the European Court's political role. Each of the contributing authors invites the reader to approach the debate on the role of the Court in terms of a constantly evolving set of interactions between the EU judiciary, the European and national political spheres, as well as a multitude of other actors vested in competing legitimacy claims. The book questions the political role of the Court as much as it stresses the opportunities - and corresponding responsibilities - that the Court's case law offers to independent observers, political institutions and civil society organisations. Judicial Activism at the European Court of Justice will appeal to researchers and graduate students as well as to EU and national officials. Contributors: A. Arnull, L. Azoulai, M. Bulterman, S. Carrera, M. Dawson, M. de Visser, B. de Witte, V. Hatzopoulos, M. Hoereth, C. Kaupa, E. Muir, B. Petkova, E. Vos, C. Wissels

The European Union is a supranational organisation with a set of circumscribed powers. Although these powers do not include an all-encompassing fundamental rights' mandate, today's existential challenges - from economic to refugee crisis, via concerns for compliance with the rule of law in some of its Member States - increase the pressure on the EU to develop tools for protection and promotion of such rights. One way of addressing the tension between the lack of a general mandate and vivid calls for protection is for the EU to focus on selected fundamental rights which it has competence to regulate. One such example is EU law on the fundamental right to equal treatment that has blossomed since the late 1990s. In developing selected fundamental right policies that can be imposed on domestic actors, as EU law does, supranational intervention needs to be carefully tailored to the plural landscape where they are intended to flourish. This monograph calls for a nuanced use of the infrastructure of EU law to convey shared values at domestic level across Europe.