What is a ‘European’ Parliament and who should vote for it? Should it be the ‘citizens’ of the European Union alone? If so, should it be all EU citizens, or only those who are resident in the member states? Or should the electorate include potentially all residents in the member states which comprise the EU and who are thus affected by decisions taken in the Parliament? Does anyone have a ‘right’ to vote for the European Parliament? And who should decide who votes for the European Parliament – the member states, or the EU itself? In other words, is there a single European concept of the European Parliamentary demos, or twenty-seven separate, but overlapping, national concepts?

Subsidiarity in the Treaty on the European Union and the Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality – Multi-level governance in federal and regional states – Belgian federalism – Necessity of dialogue – Difficulty of applying subsidiarity principle in a federal system based on exclusivity

A wave of bans and restrictions on religious clothing is sweeping Europe. Schoolchildren, judges, jurors, civil servants, and employees are among the groups whose freedom to wear clothing which indicates their religion has been questioned, as has the right of governments, employers or schools to impose restrictions. The resulting debate has led to new laws or legal judgments in, among other countries, France, Germany, Denmark and the United Kingdom.

Differences between parliamentary inviolability and parliamentary non-liability. Parliamentary inviolability in the Turkish constitution. Also for ministers. Scope and duration. Lifting of inviolability by the Grand National Assembly. Possibility of judicial review. Constitutional amendments to limit inviolability in the combat against corruption rejected.

Spanish Constitutional Court – Judicial behaviour – Mixed judicial selection – Empirical testing – Decisions of the Spanish Constitutional Court, 1980-2018 – Judicial background – Government – Senate – Congress – Spanish Judicial Council – Invalidation of statutes –Dissent opinions – Shaping politicisation.

After the attacks by Al-Qaeda on the World Trade Centre in New York and other sites on 11 September 2001, the UK Parliament enacted the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA). Part 4 of the Act allowed the Home Secretary to certify a person as a suspected international terrorist if he reasonably believed that the person's presence in the UK was a threat to national security and reasonably suspected that he or she was an international terrorist. If the person was subject to UK immigration control (i.e., had no right of abode in the UK, not being a British national), he or she could be removed from the UK and detained pending removal under immigration legislation. If a practical consideration (such as the absence of transport links between UK and the place to which the person could be removed) or a point of law which wholly or partly related to an international agreement (for example, where removing a person to his or her country of origin would render him or her liable to torture contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR)) prevented a person's removal or departure temporarily or indefinitely, the Act permitted their detention.

One of the legal cornerstones of ‘formal federalism’ is the capacity of any rule of EC Law to override any rule, including those of constitutional rank, of the Member States. The primacy doctrine has been introduced by the Court of Justice in Costa v. ENEL (1964). It can be read in two ways. In the first place it may be held to imply the supremacy of Community law, i.e., the idea that Community law has a higher rank than even the national constitutions and is hierarchically superior to it, as the Court itself sometimes has expressed it (Simmenthal, 1978). This may be called the existential reading. Alternatively, there is a more modest interpretation implying mere practical priority or precedence, as in traffic rules. For this practical interpretation there are equally arguments to be found in the Court's case-law: the aims of the EC-treaty cannot be accomplished if domestic law were to prevail over Community law.

Purely internal situations – Fundamental freedoms – Attribution of powers – Ullens de Schooten – Reverse discrimination – Non-discriminatory obstacles – EU citizenship – Preliminary rulings – Jurisdiction of the Court of Justice – Conditions of admissibility of preliminary references

Analysis of the justifiability of general burqa bans in public – Comparative study of burqa bans in France, Belgium and concept legislation in the Netherlands – Evaluation of burqa bans in light of the Article 9 ECHR, the right to freedom of religion – Evaluation of grounds for introduction of bans, including public safety, public order and the protection of rights and freedoms of others – Conclusion: general burqa bans diffcult to justify in the light of ECHR standards

Critical-contextual analysis of case law of the European Court of Justice on employers’ contractual freedom – Fundamental right to be immunised against the alleged disproportional protection enjoyed by employees – Progressive ideological overthrow of the original constitutional assumptions of the founding treaties – Prominent example of ‘displacement of social Europe’ – Court of Justice’s case law on the relationship between freedom to conduct a business and labour law – Neoliberal understanding of the freedom of enterprise – Alternative interpretation of Article 16 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

Principle of subsidiarity – Early Warning Mechanism – Protocol No. 2 on Proportionality and Subsidiarity – The scope of the principle of subsidiarity – The role of national parliaments in the EU – National parliaments’ reasoned opinions – Principle of proportionality – Principle of conferral – National sovereignty in the EU – National identity in the EU – Justification of draft legislation acts

Popular sovereignty translated as unfettered constitutional-amendment power – Weakness of constituent power as justification for unfettered amendability – Alternative concept of sovereignty as unaccountability of constituted power – Popular sovereignty as unaccountability of the referendum verdict – Sovereignty emerging at end-point, not inception of constitutional-amendment process