Stage: European Parliament - Legal Service | Maastricht University
Inducing Compliance: the Constitutional Implications of ‘Pressure’ in the European Union Legal Order
Alongside his re:constitution post-doctoral Fellowship, Robin Gadbled is Coordinator of research activities at the Institute for European Law at KU Leuven and has also been appointed by Oxford University to join the Europeaum Scholars Programme as a Teaching Fellow. He has worked previously as a Lecturer in Comparative Constitutional Law at Sciences Po (Reims campus, France). Robin holds a PhD in law from the European University Institute in Florence, a Master’s degree in Political Theory from Sciences Po Paris, a Master’s degree in pluridisciplinary European studies from the IEE-ULB in Brussels (magna cum laude), and an LL.M. in Comparative, European and International law from the EUI. His research interests include constitutional theory, EU constitutional law, EU fundamental rights law, euro-crisis law and responses to the Covid-19 crisis, as well as methodologies of legal and pluridisciplinary research. His current work focuses on the tools available to EU institutions to induce the compliance of Member States with different sets of requirements.
Inducing Compliance: the Constitutional Implications of ‘Pressure’ in the European Union Legal Order
My research project consists in a legal and constitutional exploration of ‘pressure’ as a form of action of European Union (EU) institutions, analytically distinct from other forms of action that aim at ensuring the compliance of EU member states with a given set of requirements. While the exercise of pressure is arguably not a new constitutional phenomenon at national or EU level, developing it has proven increasingly appealing to several EU institutions – and member states – when the option of directly imposing legal obligations has appeared unavailable or insufficient to satisfy expectations. Looking at pressure as a form of power exercised by EU institutions on EU member states, I investigate the constitutional checks available at EU level to limit this power. I also try to understand how or whether pressure fits into dominant constitutional theories of allocation of powers in the EU, both horizontally and vertically.
