Dr Philip Syrpis: The judiciary, the legislature and the internal market.
In 2009-2010 I was on study leave, and began working on a major project on the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature in the context of the completion of the European Union internal market. In March 2010, I organised a conference on this theme, part-funded by the Jean Monnet Chair in European Law at the University of Bristol, which took place in Antwerp. In September 2010, Cambridge University Press agreed to publish an edited collection based on the conference. Panos Koutrakos, Nina Boeger and Ryan Murphy from the School of Law are all involved.
In my view, there is all too little academic work which deals systematically with the way in which legislative interventions of various kinds affect the nature of the tasks of the Court of Justice in the EU internal market context, and with the ways in which the legislature may react to the case law of the Court. The aim of this edited collection is to explore, from a public law perspective, the relationship between Treaty interpretation by the Court of Justice and the interventions of the political institutions across a range of policy areas. It aims to explore the complex dynamics at work here, and shed new light on the governance of the EU internal market.
My interest in these ideas developed as a result of many years of study of European labour law (in 2007, I published an OUP monograph, EU Intervention in Domestic Labour Law). I have written extensively about the now infamous Viking and Laval cases, decided by the Court of Justice in December 2007 (for example, Tonia Novitz and I wrote a piece in the 2008 European Law Review, entitled ‘Economic and Social Rights in Conflict: Political and Judicial Approaches to their Reconciliation’). I am continuing to write on the developing case law of the Court in this area, and am currently analysing one of the post-Viking cases, Commission v Germany, for the Industrial Law Journal.
Away from European law, I have a long-standing interest in university admissions and widening participation. I have been involved in the National Admissions Test for Law (LNAT) since its inception in
2004, and now act as its Treasurer. I have commissioned a number of pieces of research on the widening participation effects of the LNAT, and have, in the course of 2010, been working with Tony Hoare, the University’s Director of Widening Participation Research, on research investigating the extent to which the introduction of the LNAT has affected the pattern of applications to LNAT universities from various categories of student.
I welcome research students in European Union constitutional and social law.
EU Intervention in Domestic Labour Law (OUP, 2007)