Lunch seminar with Konstantinos Alexandris Polomarkakis
The Court of Justice of the European Union and the Judicial Making of EU Labour Law
The presentation explores the CJEU's role as a sui generis law-maker and frames its diverse approaches to judicial intervention in the field of labour law in more detail. It begins by briefly considering the key narratives surrounding the Court's approach to labour law, right until the beginning of the 2008 global economic and financial crisis. This is followed by the presentation of the pertinent discourse surrounding the role of courts as law-makers, particularly in relation to labour law. There is plenty of literature that establishes the CJEU's law-making capacity, and this is not something that the presentation seeks to question. Instead, it cherishes those views, using them as a foundational premise upon which the classification of the Court's approaches to labour law builds on. In tandem, certain institutional and substantive limitations in the capacity of the CJEU to undertake unrestricted labour law-making are discussed.
A considerable part of the presentation is devoted to the conceptual framing of the diverse narratives underpinning the orientation of labour law-making and the ideological choices involved therein. The narratives draw on leading typologies, such as the worlds of welfare capitalism and the varieties of capitalism, as well as Polanyian analyses and ideas of movement and countermovement, incorporating concerns around the commodification of labour and the scope of protective measures. These act as the analytical framework for breaking down the CJEU's contribution to EU labour law-making into three distinct clusters, which lend themselves to become the driving force behind the framing of the CJEU’s approaches to judicial intervention.
The classification frames the CJEU’s role as a -sometimes inconsistent- law and policy maker and fuels a contextual analysis of its decision-making function. Although influenced by the legislative context of the dispute, the Court enjoys considerable interpretative power over it, resembling a peculiar EU lawmaker. The overall findings confirm that the Court does not follow one particular direction, reflecting, through its inconsistencies, the diverse approach towards the regulation of labour both at national and EU level.
Speaker Bio
Konstantinos Alexandris Polomarkakis is Professor of Law at Royal Holloway, University of London. He joined Royal Holloway from the University of Exeter, where he was Senior Lecturer in Law and co-director of the Centre for European Legal Studies.
Konstantinos's research interests centre on the impact of policy and judicial decision making on the trajectory of labour and non-discrimination law, especially at the European level. A core strand of his research looks, from a socio-legal perspective, at the ways in which the Court of Justice of the European Union can step in the shoes of the legislator through its decision-making capacity.
His research has been published in leading generalist and specialist journals, such as the Modern Law Review, Social & Legal Studies, European Law Open and European Journal of Risk Regulation. His monograph, provisionally titled 'The Judicial Making of Labour Law', is under contract with Oxford University Press and examines the conceptualisation of European labour law by the Court of Justice of the European Union.