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What is the nature of the relationship between the fields of new technology and EU law? What challenges do new technologies pose for the internal market and the principles of the EU? These questions are explored with reference to specific fields of technology and policy areas in order to understand this relationship and its challenges

Seashores - An Ecological Guide provides an easy-to-use, authoritative reference to commonly occurring organisms. By looking at the habitats of the coastline, it focuses on key species you are likely to find. The book explains how these organisms have adapted and how they are able to cope with the environmental stresses of the seashore. With over 400 colour photographs, the guide looks first at the physical and biological features that determine our coast before surveying the variety of communities that exist on our shores. These include: rocky shores; sand and mud; estuaries; salt-marsh; sand

The EU has long faced difficulties in ensuring compliance with its legal provisions, and as a result has developed sophisticated enforcement techniques that penetrate deep into the law and politics of member states. This book gathers leading experts to assess the legal procedures and political mechanisms at work in the EU to promote compliance.

External relations is among the most dynamic areas of EU law its constitutional foundations profoundly affected by the Reform Treaty. This volume gathers leading analysts to assess core developments in the field, including the coherence of the EU's activity, its development policy and its contribution to international law

Europe must revise outdated grid plans to prepare for surging deployment of wind and solar power.

Published online: 06 February 2018 ; This comment analyses the legal context and significance of the Opinion handed down by the Court of Justice on 16 May 2017 on the envisaged free trade agreement between the EU and Singapore. At the heart of the Opinion are questions over competence, in particular the scope of the post-Lisbon common commercial policy, but including also the extent to which trade agreements may encompass provisions on sustainable development, regulatory issues and investor-state dispute settlement. The Singapore agreement is an example of the EU's current generation of 'deep and comprehensive' trade agreements that represent the core of EU trade policy, and the Court's Opinion is thus important not only for the future of the Singapore Agreement itself, but for future trade agreements (including a possible future EU-UK agreement).

The common commercial policy (CCP) has often been hailed as the most supranational, and the most successful, of the EU's external policies, through which it demonstrates real weight and influence in the world. This success has been attributed in part to the CCP's decision-making processes which were held up as a model of the 'Community method', as well as to the fact that the CCP has been accepted as an exclusive competence since the early 1970s; its description as a 'common' policy is witness to a substantial degree of integration. It is in the provisions on the CCP that the Union's external policy underwent some of the most significant changes as a result of the Lisbon Treaty. Seven years after the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty, we can assess those changes and whether they do in fact represent, or have facilitated, a revolution in EU trade policy-making. In these seven years some, but certainly not all, of the uncertainties over the revised Treaty provisions on the CCP have been resolved and new questions have emerged. We cannot yet look back from 2017 to 2009 and see a true revolution in trade policy. But the Lisbon Treaty put in place mechanisms which could progressively lead to a 'quiet revolution' – a trade policy that looks very different from the paradigm of the last 40 years. Whether this happens, and indeed what such a trade policy might look like, will depend on the choices made by the Commission over the next few years, but also on the ways in which the Parliament rises to the challenge to exercise a strategic influence, and the degree and nature of public engagement in the policy choices to be made.

Posted in e-Journal European Papers 24.11.2017 ; This article discusses the role of the Court of Justice in reviewing acts adopted under the Common Foreign and Security Policy, seeking to determine to what extent the "exceptionalism" of the CFSP, its characterisation as a field of executive action largely shielded from judicial scrutiny, is an accurate assessment. The Court's role is constrained in two ways. First, although the CFSP has been integrated into the overall legal structures of EU external relations by the Lisbon Treaty, it is still subject to "specific rules and procedures" (Art. 24, para. 1, TEU) and among these specific rules are limitations on the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice. Second, is the self-restraint of the Court itself when reviewing acts adopted within the framework of external policies in which the decision-making institutions have a wide discretion; this self-restraint is not specific to the CFSP but the CFSP is a clear case of broad policy discretion. Despite these constraints we are seeing a growing number of cases in which the Court is asked to assess the legality of CFSP acts. The article addresses three main questions: 1) What is the scope of the limitation to judicial review in the CFSP? 2) What is the scope of the Treaty-based exceptions to this limitation? 3) Does the degree and intensity of judicial scrutiny of CFSP acts demonstrate a particular judicial reticence with respect to CFSP?

Published: 24 December 2016 ; The nature of the Treaty provisions on EU external action, with a set of open-ended policy objectives and fewer policy-directed legal obligations on the Member States, has left much to the agenda-setting of the political institutions. The Court of Justice emphasises the need for the institutions to retain their discretion, their room for manoeuvre; it is non-interventionist, tending to take those choices at face value without seeking to define or shape them. Instead it has taken on another role: it ensures that the institutions act within their powers, and that the Member States do not obstruct the formation and implementation of Union policy. It is in fact engaged in establishing and protecting an institutional space within which policy may be formed, in which the different actors understand and work within their respective roles. The principles which have been drawn from the Treaties and elaborated by the Court to establish this institutional space are identified here as 'structural principles'. They include the duty of sincere cooperation, the principles of conferral and institutional balance, mutual solidarity, subsidiarity, and the principle of autonomy. By identifying and developing these principles, which by their nature are flexible and capable of evolution, the Court of Justice exercises a formidable role in the governance of EU external action despite its hands-off approach to substantive policy choice. This paper seeks to explore further the nature of these structural principles as legal norms. It first offers an explanation for the importance of structural principles in the EU s external relations by exploring the nature of EU external relations powers. Second it begins an enquiry into the nature of structural principles: what does it mean to say that they are principles, that they are structural, and that they operate within external relations? Third, it offers a tentative typology of structural principles and some ideas on the ways in which they may complement and operate in tension with each other.

In case C-533/08 TNT Express, the Court of Justice interpreted Article 71 of Regulation 44/2001 (the Brussels Regulation) which provides that the Regulation 'shall not affect any conventions to which the Member States are parties and which in relation to particular matters, govern jurisdiction or the recognition or enforcement of judgments'. The Court held that the provision must be interpreted as including the implied condition that the specialised conventions referred to can only apply to the extent to which they do not undermine the 'underlying principles' of the Brussels Regulation, including the principles of mutual trust and free movement of judgments. The Court also found that it had no jurisdiction to interpret the specialised convention at issue in this case. The judgment is important for the development of private international law in the EU and for the EU as a locus for the development of private international law, regionally and globally. The Court has effectively decided that certain principles which underlie the policy field are constitutional in nature and non-derogable even where the legislature has chosen to limit the scope of harmonisation and thus the degree of uniformity in the Union system and to leave space to an international regime. Thus certain choices in the creation of the area of freedom, security and justice are removed from the political agenda. This paper offers a critique of the Court's approach on a number of points, the aim being to try to tease out the implications of the ruling and to offer a different perspective.