Introduction to EU Law)

Hello everybody and welcome to an introduction to European Union Law. In this lesson what we're going to do is take a very brief introduction to the study of the European Union by taking an examination of some of the descriptive realities of the European Union. So talking about what the European Union actually is, talking about the way in which the European Union is regulated, the kind of member states that exist within the European Union, the way in which the European Union has developed over time, and then outlining the series, the scope of this series of lessons, talking about the things that we're going to be covering in this series of lessons. It is the first in a brand new series that we have on the Law of the European Union. I've put a little exclamation point in the end of it there to highlight my excitement with doing EU Law again. And this is, like I said, the first lesson where we're going to take an introduction to the subject as well as outlining the scope of this series of lessons. So ultimately the first question that we can ask, and that you probably should ask if you are somebody who is studying European Union Law and has never had any interaction or in any relationship with the European Union at all, is well what actually is the European Union? And this would be a confusing question to ask if you are somebody who lives in Europe, pretty much any part of Europe, you should be very, very, very familiar with what the European Union is. Everybody who studies law in Europe will have to have studied the European Union and have to have studied EU Law in quite a great amount of detail. Even those who are studying law in the UK, where we no longer are members of the European Union, will have to study EU Law as a core and foundational module. So simply put, we call the European Union, and we can describe the European Union, as something known as a supranational political and economic union. This is quite a complicated set of phrases and ideas, but ultimately what the European Union is, is an institution, a political and economic institution, which is made up of a number of states within the continent of Europe, and these are known as member states, and we will call them from now on as the member states of the European Union. There are currently 27 member states within the European Union at the time of recording this lesson. I'm going to quickly cite this as the 5th of October 2023, as the date in which this lesson was made. So if there are more or less in a few years time, that's the reason why I've written 27 here, because it's recorded on that particular day. Now the European Union is often considered by a number of different scholars, academics, and even legal practitioners, as a sui generis legal and political entity, which is just a fancy way of saying a unique political entity. It is a unique political and legal entity. This is not to suggest that there are not others that exist, there are no other regional institutions that exist, that have attempted in some ways to mimic the structure, the legal powers, and economic regulation of the European Union. Two that I can think of here is the African Union, to an extent has been building this kind of economic and political union within the continent of Africa, and to a lesser extent you can talk about ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which has some of the similar competences in terms of their regulation that the European Union has. And so ASEAN, again, is to a lesser extent than other elements of regional institutions, but is a useful example as well. But it is just the case that the European Union, owing to the history of the European Union, the history of how it begins to develop, as well as actually the history of Europe as a whole, it makes it relatively unique, and it gives it a relative uniqueness in terms of the way in which not only the European Union operates within Europe itself, but how the European Union operates on the world stage. Now we're not going to do any lessons in this series on something known as EU external relations law, which is the sort of way in which the European Union interacts with other states as a unified political and legal entity, and sort of exists within international law. That's a separate series of lessons for the European Law Academy in and of itself. You should just know that when the European Union, when we talk about the European Union, we do talk about it for a lot of cases as a single unified entity, and there is this sort of commonality that exists whereby, for example, in the case of international trade, there isn't international trade with specific member states of the European Union, more so it is the case that you trade with the European Union as a unified political entity, rather than as with the single member states of the European Union. In terms of the law of the EU, we've seen that since the 1950s at the end of the Second World War, where we see the development of the early genesis of the European Union, we begin to see a gradual development of EU law. So EU law is not something that comes into fruition as it is now, right at the beginning of the development of the European Union in the 1950s. Instead, it has developed gradually, just like the European Union more holistically. The development of EU law has been made through amendments to treaties, through the new treaties into the broader corpus of EU treaty law, as well as the addition of new member states towards the European Union, and the conferring of what we call competences to the European Union. So competences can be described as the kind of areas of law that are then taken out of the remit of the member states, and are given to the remit of the European Union at the supranational level. So one example of this could be, for example, citizenship rights within the European Union. That is something that is regulated not necessarily by member states per se, but rather by the European Union as a harmonized supranational political entity itself. And these are the kind of competences that begin to transfer from member states up to this supranational institution. We'll get to the ways in which harmonization works, and the ways in which you have different methods of harmonization, including things such as mutual recognition, when we talk about the single market in a brief amount of detail in future lessons time. In terms of member states, the European Union actually began as the European Community, the EC, with just six member states. And between 1973 and 2013, we would see the addition of a further 22 member states joining the European Union. And this would happen at various different stages and periods of enlargement. So you'd have, for example, the United Kingdom in the 1970s joining the European Union, followed by other member states. We'd see, following the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, we see quite a significant increase in enlargement when we see a number of Eastern European states, which were formerly members of the Soviet bloc, the USSR, become members of the European Union. And in 2013, we get these sort of 28 member states which represented the peak of membership of the European Union. We've seen a reduction in the number of member states of the European Union by one in 2020, when the only ever member to leave the European Union was the United Kingdom, with obviously Brexit. Now we'll talk about Brexit very briefly in this sort of introductory series of lessons, but I kind of want to talk about Brexit in and of itself as a separate series of videos, maybe a sort of short little mini-series on the way in which Brexit operates from both a United Kingdom's legal system perspective and from the perspective of the law of the European Union. But ultimately that's obviously the most controversial political thing that has happened to the European Union in recent years. We also have new members that are in various stages of the process, which is the joining of the European Union. So for many years, Turkey has been a potential candidate member of the European Union, so too has North Macedonia, so too has Ukraine, and as well as Kosovo, and also Georgia. There are others as well, so Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there are probably some more smaller minor states that want to also join in the European Union as well. And we are probably likely going to see a number of these states join the European Union in the future. Of course there are some states that are currently, at time of recording, wrapped up in various different international armed conflicts, like for example Ukraine, and there is a lot of political controversy around the idea of Turkey joining the European Union, owing to the political system within Turkey, but it is likely that we are probably going to see a number of these member states listed here, or at least a number of these states listed here, become member states towards the European Union. So what is this series actually going to entail? Well we're going to take essentially a general look at the law of the European Union. We're going to be covering the content which would be expected of a typical undergraduate module on EU law. So we're going to be talking about things like the institutions of the European Union, the way in which EU law applies in member states, the idea of judicial review, things like direct effect etc etc etc. And it means as well that we're going to be talking about a number of topics which we'll be exploring in a modest amount of detail, but not necessarily in the amount of detail that we will get to in future lessons. So a notable example of this is towards the end of this series of lessons we're going to do a few, a good 10 or so videos on the single market and the law of the single market, but for the most part that is going to be a more advanced series of lessons in and of itself that's going to come in a separate series. So as a result of which we're going to be covering it to an undergraduate esque level, but then we will be talking about it in far more detail as a separate series of lessons in and of itself, more advanced series. So just bear in mind that if you feel that we haven't gone into a particular topic in enough detail it is very very likely that we will go into it in more detail in the future. So the first major topic is going to be the introduction to EU law. So we're going to talk about what the European Union is, we'll take a brief history of the European Union, we'll talk about the development of the EU, we'll talk about the various stages of development, we might dive a little bit into some of the different theories of European integration, and then we'll talk about the impact of Brexit and the way in which Brexit has not only impacted the United Kingdom but has also impacted the European Union. We will then get into the sort of institutional law of the European Union, so we'll talk about the various institutions of the EU including the Parliament, the two councils, the Commission, the European Court of Justice, as well as some other minor institutions, so things like the auditing institutions and some of the minor judicial institutions of the European Union. As well as this we will talk about the law of the European Union as well, we'll talk about the law making process and the types of law that exists within the European Union, so things like the sources of law within the EU, the law making process, the distinction between the treaties which is seen as primary law and the sort of secondary law which exists as sort of regulations, directives and decisions. We will then get on to looking at how the European Union law is applied within the domestic jurisdictions of member states. This involves talking about the principle of supremacy, the doctrine of sincere cooperation, and then the procedural mechanisms in more detail, the principle of direct effect, the principle of indirect effect, the principle of incidental effect and the idea of state liability. We will then finish looking at the law in its general form by talking about preliminary references, the procedure for preliminary references and getting familiar with Article 267 as well as exceptions to this particular procedure, before taking an outline examination of the European Union's single market. This involves looking at the rationales and the fundamental theories of the single market and then turning to the free movement of goods, free movement of persons, freedom of establishment and the freedom to provide services.