Argentina — Import Measures: How a Porsche is Worth Peanuts

The dispute Argentina-Measures Affecting the Importation of Goods concerns a series of measures imposed by Argentine authorities on economic operators as a condition for obtaining import licenses. These measures were introduced with the goal of advancing the Argentine government’s stated policies of re-industrialization, import substitution, and elimination of trade balance deficits. From a legal point of view, the least interesting feature of the dispute was the substantive compatibility of these measures with Article XI:1 GATT as they clearly constituted import restrictions. Identifying and classifying the measures involved, however, proved more challenging: based on vague policy guidelines, devoid of any legal basis, and consisting largely of wholly discretionary ad hoc action by the authorities, clouded in confidential obscurity, the measures escaped familiar categories and distinctions of WTO law. From an economic perspective, although Argentina’s measures appear to have had no impact on its overall imports, they imposed large costs on foreign companies, as well as on Argentine importers and consumers. ISSN: 1028-362

The Bank, the Bond and the Bail-Out: On the Legal Construction of Market Discipline in the Eurozone

The ‘logic of the market’, so holds the Court of Justice, is the standard of legality of financial assistance to indebted member states under EU law and, ultimately, the legal justification for strict conditionality and the imposition of austerity. This logic of the market, though, is different from actual market behaviour. Austerity, it turns out, is not the inevitable response to market pressures but a function of political substitutes for market discipline (Pringle) and technocratic truth seeking about the ‘correct’ price of debt (Gauweiler) which the Court has frozen into law. The perverse consequence of making the modalities of financial assistance dependent on the ‘logic of the market’ is, moreover, to render the assistance as ineffective and expensive as possible. ‘The logic of the market’ in the Court's case law is best seen as punitive and cynical politics masquerading as inept economics

What Blanchard gets wrong: the puzzling persistence of managerialism in EU fiscal governance

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted renewed debate over the architecture of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. Marco Dani, Dario Guarascio, Joana Mendes, Agustin José Menéndez, Harm Schepel and Mike Wilkinson respond to a recent proposal to overhaul the EU’s current fiscal framework. They argue that while the EU’s fiscal rules should undoubtedly be reformed, a more radical solution is required that puts democratic politics at the heart of the EU’s fiscal governance

Introducing European Law Open

Published online: 06 April 2022These lines start on Page 1 of Issue 1 of Volume 1 of European Law Open, and are written with a sense of occasion of new beginnings, and in deep gratitude for the support of the academic community and the trust placed in us by Cambridge University Press. Launching a new open access journal of European law in times of COVID-19, economic slumps and widespread financial pressures on higher education is not a decision to be taken lightly, and it has not been taken lightly. Surely, there is a place, indeed a need, for contextual and critical approaches to European law. Many of us have dedicated years to fostering such work as editors and Board members of a certain other journal in another place, which we left collectively in early 2020. It is a heritage we are proud of, and a tradition we will build on. It is also clear, however, that over the decades – in no small measure thanks to that other journal – contextual approaches have become mainstream in EU law, and that, as a consequence, ‘European law in context’ as a description of a particular style of scholarship has lost much of its clarity and purpose. Not entirely in jest, we sometimes joke that the new frontier, the really cool, edgy stuff in EU law these days would consist of good old-fashioned doctrinal work. If only it existed