This paper presents the results of a pioneering venture into opening up the black box of the EU judicial process and determining how the European Court of Justice and national courts work together. The project investigates the effects of certain independent variables legal system experience, issue transparency and compliance upon courts’ decisions to maneuver strategically within the referral p...

On July 11, in Christine Goodwin v. United Kingdom (Application No. 28957/95) and I. v. United Kingdom (Application No. 25680/94), a Grand Chamber of 17 judges of the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that the United Kingdom’s refusal to permit post-operative transsexuals to have their birth certificates amended to reflect their reassigned sex, and to contract different-sex marria...

According to functional theories of punishment in law, punishment is not to be considered as an end in itself. As for example Germany is concerned, the highest criminal courts in the country purport in their doctrinal terminology that administering criminal law may only be justified when it simultaneously proves that it is a necessary means for fulfilling the protective function of criminal law...

The legal system of the European Union (EU) offers domestic actors a powerful tool to influence national policy. European law can be drawn on by private litigants in national courts to challenge national policies. These challenges can be sent by national judges to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which instructs national courts to apply European law instead of national law, or to interpret ...

Preliminary references to the Court of Justice for the European Union are unevenly distributed across the EU, creating differing access to justice for European citizens. This study presents case studies of the UK and France, exploring factors affecting rates of social policy preliminary references from 1996-2009. The UK had a rate twice that of France. What accounts for this difference? Analysi...

The European Court of Human Rights’ margin of appreciation doctrine is of growing importance in general international law. Existing scholarship, however, fails to consider the political stakes involved in its use. The aim of this paper is to offer a reconceptualisation of the margin as a tool of global governance in the context of the increasing judicialisation of human rights protection in Eur...

The international legal order, although pluralist in structure, is in the process of being constitutionalized. This article supports this claim in several different ways. In the Part L I argue that most accepted understandings of "constitution" would readily apply to at least some international regimes. In Part II, I discuss different notions of "constitutional pluralism," and demonstrate that ...

For many years, every week without fail, this magazine used to contain an advertisement close to the front cover, drawing attention to the right to life in Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and claiming that the rights of the unborn child were being habitually disregarded by Britain’s liberal abortion laws. When the Human Rights Act came into force in 2000, it was widely exp...

The problem of changing the civil status of transsexuals has been tackled in different ways in various European countries. Six applications made by transsexuals have led to judgments by the European Court of Human Rights. These cases illuminate some specific aspects of the relationships between health, law, and human rights, including criteria used to determine gender and the impact of authorit...

[1] Diane Pretty died of natural causes on 11 May 2002 from motor neurone disease, a paralysing, degenerative and incurable illness. Her fight to choose the time and manner of her death assisted by her husband was a resounding legal failure. A unanimous body of judicial opinion in both the English Divisional Court and the House of Lords, (1) followed by the European Court of Human Rights, (2) d...