Ever since its inception, one of the essential tasks of the EU has been to establish the internal market. Despite the impressive body of case law and legislation regarding the internal market, legal and factual barriers still exist for citizens seeking to exercise their full rights under EU law. This book analyses these barriers and proposes ways in which they may be overcome. Next to analysing the key barriers to exercising economic rights more generally, this book focuses on three areas which represent the applications of the four basic freedoms: consumer rights, the rights of professionals in gaining access to the market, and intellectual property rights in the Digital Single Market. With chapters from leading researchers, the main pathways towards the reduction and removal of these barriers are considered. Taking into account important factors including the global financial crisis, as well as practical barriers, such as multilingualism, the solutions provided in this book present a pathway to enhance cross-border realization of European citizens? access to their economic rights, as well as increasing in the cultural richness of the EU. EU Citizens? Economic Rights in Actionis an important book, which will be an essential resource for students of EU citizenship and economics, as well as for EU policymakers and practitioners interested in the field.

This book identifies, analyses and compares a variety of possible ‘barriers’ to the exercise of European citizenship and discusses ways to move beyond these barriers. It contributes in a multi-disciplinary way to a highly topical issue and offers new perspectives on EU citizenship in the sense that it critically analyses concepts of citizenship, the way EU citizenship is politically, legally and socially institutionalized, and elaborates alternatives to the current paths of realizing EU citizenship.

The relevance of contracting and self-regulation in consumer markets has increased rapidly in recent years, in particular in the platform economy. Online platforms provide opportunities for businesses and consumers to connect with strangers, often across borders, trading products, and services. In this new economy, platform operators create, apply and enforce their own rules in their contractual relationships with users. This book examines the substance of these rules and the space for private governance beyond the reach of state regulation. Vanessa Mak explores recent developments in lawmaking 'beyond the state' with case studies focusing on companies such as Airbnb and Amazon. The book asks how common values and objectives of EU law, such as consumer protection and contractual fairness, can be safeguarded when lawmaking shifts to a space outside the reach of state law.

This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.

This thought-provoking book examines the state of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and its shortcomings in terms of social rights protection in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the Euro crisis. Providing a critical analysis of the basic tenets of European economic governance, it highlights current challenges for a Social Europe and proposes new avenues for tackling these issues.

This book looks at democratic empowerment via institutional designs that extend the political rights of European citizens. It focuses on three themes: first, the positive and negative effects of the European Union institutional design on the political rights of its citizens; second, challenges for democratic regimes across the world in the 21st century in the context of regionalism and globalization; third, the constraints of neoliberalism and capitalist markets on the ability of citizens to effectively achieve their political rights within the Union.

Die Regulierung verschiedener Märkte hat in den letzten Jahren deutlich zugenommen. Obwohl das Fehlen geeigneter Vorschriften sehr gefährlich sein kann, ist es dennoch wichtig, eine Überregulierung zu vermeiden, um die wirtschaftliche Freiheit als Grundlage des sozioökonomischen Systems in der westlichen Welt nicht zu gefährden. Die vergleichende Untersuchung deckt das Wettbewerbsrecht sowie die sektoralen Vorschriften des Telekommunikations-, Energie- und Finanzmarktes ab und dient dem Ziel der Überprüfung gemeinsamer Grundsätze, anhand derer die Maßnahmen verschiedener Regulierungsbehörden bewertet werden können. Der zweite Schritt ist die Festlegung gemeinsamer Standards für die Bewertung der Eingriffe von Regulierungsbehörden in die wirtschaftliche Freiheit. Das Buch ist nicht nur für Praktiker des Privatsektors von Bedeutung, sondern auch für Regulierungsbehörden der EU-Mitgliedstaaten sowie für nationale und EU-Gesetzgeber und berücksichtigt bereits die verstärkte Regulierung in der Corona-Krise. Mit Beiträgen von Robert Grzeszczak, Dawid Sześciło, Artur Szmigielski, Tomasz Klemt, Michał Dorociak, Maciej Sokołowski, Michalina Szpyrka, Paweł Wajda

Unlike many other countries, the United States has few constitutional guarantees of social welfare rights such as income, housing, or healthcare. In part this is because many Americans believe that the courts cannot possibly enforce such guarantees. However, recent innovations in constitutional design in other countries suggest that such rights can be judicially enforced--not by increasing the power of the courts but by decreasing it. In Weak Courts, Strong Rights, Mark Tushnet uses a comparative legal perspective to show how creating weaker forms of judicial review may actually allow for stronger social welfare rights under American constitutional law. Under "strong-form" judicial review, as in the United States, judicial interpretations of the constitution are binding on other branches of government. In contrast, "weak-form" review allows the legislature and executive to reject constitutional rulings by the judiciary--as long as they do so publicly. Tushnet describes how weak-form review works in Great Britain and Canada and discusses the extent to which legislatures can be expected to enforce constitutional norms on their own. With that background, he turns to social welfare rights, explaining the connection between the "state action" or "horizontal effect" doctrine and the enforcement of social welfare rights. Tushnet then draws together the analysis of weak-form review and that of social welfare rights, explaining how weak-form review could be used to enforce those rights. He demonstrates that there is a clear judicial path--not an insurmountable judicial hurdle--to better enforcement of constitutional social welfare rights.

In the United Kingdom during the past decade, individuals and groups have increasingly tested the extent to which principles of English administrative law can be used to gain entitlements to health and welfare services and priority for the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. One of the primary purposes of this book is to demonstrate the extent to which established boundaries of judicial intervention in socio-economic disputes have been altered by the extension of judicial powers in sections 3 and 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998, and through the development of a jurisprudence of positive obligations in the European Convention on Human Rights 1950. Thus, the substantive focus of the book is on developments in the constitutional law of the United Kingdom. However, the book also addresses key issues of theoretical human rights, international and comparative constitutional law. Issues of justiciability in English administrative law have therefore been explored against a background of two factors: a growing acceptance of the need for balance in the protection in modern constitutional arrangements afforded to civil and political rights on the one hand and socio-economic rights on the other hand; and controversy as to whether courts could make a more effective contribution to the protection of socio-economic rights with the assistance of appropriately tailored constitutional provisions.