How does EU free movement alter the role of the sovereign state? While this question may not sound new, this Article addresses it from a novel angle. If from the perspective of host Member States free movement upgrades a class of migrants to the status of ‘migrant citizens’, from the perspective of home Member States free movement instead splits the class of the citizens into citizen–settlers and citizen–migrants. The Article explores how the social contract between the state and the citizen is rewritten in the wake of this latter transformation. It articulates the duty of the states as agents for the citizen–migrants. It flashes out the implications for the relation between citizen–migrants and citizen–settlers. And it points to the partly reflexive nature of duties of states and citizens towards non-citizen migrants. It thus ultimately sheds light on how free movement prompts the sovereign state to embrace cosmopolitan obligations towards others ‘from within’, as an indirect effect of advancing the transnational interests of the citizen–migrants. The findings ultimately add to the cosmopolitan statist vision of European integration, while also rephrasing some of the questions of solidarity, non-discrimination and participation that remain unanswered in the literature on Union citizenship and free movement.

European cities struggle to regulate platform-mediated short-term rental services in response to local concerns over uncontrolled tourism and affordable housing. In their efforts to tame online platforms and local hosts, cities have consistently pointed to EU law as an obstacle to effective regulation and enforcement and called for solutions at EU level. To date, research has paid limited attention to the precise role of EU law in the regulatory responses to the growth of short-term renting. This article therefore offers an explanation of how EU internal market law structures the multi-level dynamics behind short-rental regulation. Methodologically, the article relies on a contextual analysis of the EU’s legal framework for (electronic) services and an in-depth, longitudinal case study of the City of Amsterdam’s efforts to regulate its Airbnb-driven short-term rental market (2013–2023). Comprehensive empirical evidence indicates that European e-commerce law can deter governments from enforcing platform cooperation in the upstream market and, instead, prompt them to shift the burden of regulation and compliance to the ‘actual’ service providers (the hosts) in the downstream market. These upstream/downstream dynamics also help to explain the successful adoption and normative content of the recent Short-Term Rental Regulation. With its focus on the power struggle between cities and platform actors in the EU internal market, the article also offers a unique, empirically grounded account of how EU law structures urban conflicts over housing and tourism in the context of platformisation and how platformisation might affect the dynamics of European market integration more generally.

Interactions of global change science, business and policymakers play a crucial role in shaping today’s regulatory frameworks for corporate sustainability. Our research question is why sustainability might actually be undermined by the ways that some prominent interfaces are informing corporate sustainability. Concentrating on ‘science-based’ initiatives that prescribe quantitative target-setting, business-driven task forces that define frameworks for businesses to assess and disclose information on strategies and targets, and the European Union (EU) as a supranational policymaking power, we scrutinise concepts, debates and developments involving these three globally influential non-state actors.

Although the conceptualisation of sustainability as a safe and just space is well established in academic and policy contexts, key premises are being lost in translation at science–business–policy interfaces, delaying or actually deflecting regulation of business. We call for science–business–policy interfaces to conceptualise corporate sustainability as business contributing to mitigating planetary biophysical pressures and securing social foundations worldwide. In this context, we argue that the research basis for ‘safe and just’ cannot be reduced to simplistic and separate quantifications. Treating global sustainability goals as an itemised checklist for business action, and using scientifically narrow and overly reductive approaches to quantification and target-setting, fall short of this systemic understanding of corporate sustainability.

The recognition of risks of unsustainability and the desire for sustainable value creation can act as drivers for change. Paradoxically, today’s business concept of ‘sustainable value’ actually undermines the potential for transformations to sustainability, and the dominant finance-driven treatment of ‘sustainability risks’ fall far short of capturing the hazards of continued unsustainabilities. In examining what the EU is actually doing, we find that the EU’s unprecedented attempts at regulating business for sustainability are being thwarted through powerful lobby interests, the outcomes of the science–business–policy interface, and the EU’s own fixation on economic growth and finance.

Sustainability involves dealing justly with today’s unsafe conditions, and dealing safely with unjust conditions. This requires radically more innovative responses from business, truly sustainability-oriented adaptive leadership from policymakers, and critically reflexive transdisciplinary engagement by a much wider range of sustainability scholars.

Consumers have in law been defined as the weaker parties in a transaction. Contract laws have integrated consumer protection with a view to balancing the interests of the parties, ensuring equal bargaining power and to some extent substantive fairness in contractual relations. Rules of consumer protection have therefore, from a contract lawyer’s perspective, been construed as expressions of a general principle of equality. The principle of equality, conceived in this way, complements the general principle of autonomy underlying contract law, which embodies the idea that parties should have the capacity for self-realisation. Does this construction of consumer contract law still hold in EU consumer markets transformed by the rise of online platforms and the overall move towards an economy based on services and experiences rather than the sale of physical goods? Or do we need to redefine the ways in which the principle of equality is expressed in European contract law in order to correct for new inequalities arising between consumers and businesses? This article aims to answer that question against the backdrop of established insights of the ways in which the rationality of European contract law differs from that of national, doctrinal private law systems. It concludes that the rules laid down in instruments such as the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) and the Unfair Contract Terms Directive (UCTD) can protect consumers against exploitative practices. However, problems arise in cases where the interest at stake go beyond economic interests and concern also non-economic interests, such as data protection or freedom of expression, or do not have a market exchange value. Solutions can be pursued, it is submitted, by the European legislator and the European Court of Justice, potentially using the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as a catalyst for reform.

Competition law is experiencing a transformation from a niche economic tool to a Swiss knife of broader industrial and social policy. Relatedly, there is a narrative that sees an expansive role for competition law in broad areas such as sustainability, privacy, and workers and labour rights, and a counternarrative that wants to deny it that role. There is rich scholarship on this area, but little empirical backing. In this article, we present the results of a comprehensive empirical research into whether new goals and objectives such as sustainability, privacy, and workers and labour rights are indeed endorsed in EU competition law and practice. We do so through an investigation into the totality of Court of Justice rulings, Commission decisions, Advocate General opinions, and public statements of the Commission. Our findings inject data into the debate and help dispel misconceptions that may arise by overly focusing on cherry-picked high-profile decisions while overlooking the rest of the EU’s institutional practice.

We find that sustainability is partially recognised as a goal whereas privacy and labour rights are not. We also show that all three goals are more recent than classic goals, that EU institutions have not engaged much with the areas of sustainability, privacy, and workers and labour rights, and that the Commission’s rhetoric is seemingly out of pace with decisional practice. We also identify trends that may bode for change, and we contextualize our analysis through the lens of the history and nature of the EU’s integration and economic constitution.

Climate change law faces a serious implementation problem. New instruments promoted by states from the Global North to address the implementation gap come from the sphere of trade and supply chain regulation. This article focuses on corporate climate due diligence legislation and its potential contribution to fulfilling the objectives outlined in the Paris Agreement. By examining the EU’s legislative process towards adopting a Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), it explores various approaches to regulating the climate impacts of corporations, including along global supply chains. The article critiques both the ultimately adopted climate transition planning requirement and the European Parliament’s alternative proposal, which aimed to incorporate climate mitigation into the general due diligence framework of the Directive but was unsuccessful. It applies two overarching critiques, termed ‘not enough’ and ‘regulatory imperialism’, to the specific context of corporate climate due diligence. Although these critiques may initially appear contradictory, the article endeavours to reconcile them through a compromise approach that fosters greater participation, integrates measures to mitigate impacts on self-determination, and specifies the obligations imposed on corporations regarding climate mitigation. Finally, the article discusses the idea of a decentralised enforcement regime and highlights the importance of regulation in states of the Global South to achieve a truly planetary legal order on corporate climate accountability.

Much existing social commentary and scholarship around the regulation of the European digital economy is focused on how societies could better regulate that economy and its associated harms. Such analyses often portray a problematically viewed order as ungoverned, or not effectively governed, by law. Instead, I argue for more (re)descriptive analyses on how our pre-existing legal structures powerfully create order in the European digital economy. I explain why we should explore the productive connections between pre-existing European legal arrangements and socio-technical order, and discuss what such exploration could entail. The article covers three complementary ways in which legal arrangements are productively connected to sociotechnical order: as tools of ordering to address problems and promote values; as tools that can also enable projects unintended and unforeseen by policymakers; and as constitutive of technologies and other forms of order. It provides concrete examples of these productive connections from various contemporary struggles within the governance of the European digital economy. I argue that focusing on the analysis of productive connections may shed light on how pre-existing legal arrangements are baked into and shaped by the European socio-technical order. As the current order of the European digital economy is characterised by massive inequalities, these analyses can also direct our attention to how our pre-existing legal arrangements can produce and reproduce inequalities and oppression. Analyses of pre-existing legal arrangements might produce different attributions of responsibility and possibilities of contestation than analyses of legal deficiency.

In their recent article ‘Europe’s political constitution’, Alexander Somek and Elisabeth Paar conclude: ‘scholactivism is the form of constitutional law of Europe. There is nothing below or above it. It is all there is’. In this reply I want to take issue with such (rather bleak) view of what European constitutional scholarship is about. Firstly, I argue that scholactivism undermines the very conditions of scholarship as a pursuit of knowledge autonomous from both public and private power. The current attacks on academic institutions by authoritarian governments, and also the increasing dependence of research on private funders result, at least in part, from the politicization of scholarship. Secondly, I argue that we should be more critical towards the infrastructure of the digital public sphere, which Somek and Paar see to be emerging through blogs and other platforms, and be more protective of the existing practices that we inherited from our predecessors.

This is a reply to Komárek’s criticism of our article “Europe’s political constitution”. We address the issues raised by our critic one by one. The topics range from the definition of the public sphere to the role that law blogs and social media play in it. The reply concludes by examining what it means to pursue truth in legal scholarship based on contrasting the views of Hans Kelsen und Stanley Fish.