Introduction: Redressing EU law, Redress through EU law?

Abstract

This short introduction to the symposium on Christodoulidis’s The Redress of Law highlights the reasons why the book will be relevant to readers interested in EU law. First, EU law is the main body of positive law by reference to which the author develops his argument. In the process, he offers a critical assessment of the state of EU law, which has played a key role as the main vehicle of the neoliberalisation of the legal systems of the Member States of the EU. Second, some of the key concepts elaborated and sharpened by the author can be used to build up a critical theory of EU law. This is illustrated by considering how a critical theory of the history of EU law could be written, and by showing that Christodoulidis offers us the elements with which to reconstruct how EU got transformed from the 1970s through the reverse engineering of some of the key institutions and substantive norms of democratic political constitutionalism.

Keywords

• democratic and social constitutionalism
• neoliberal constitutionalism
• neo-ordo-liberalism
• proportionality