By Adhiraj Lath and Marwan Ben Moussa The European Union (EU) has been dismantling investor-state dispute settlement inside the Union. In Achmea, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU or Court) held that arbitration clauses in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) between Member States are incompatible with EU law. In Komstroy, the Court extended that logic to the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). Member States then terminated all intra-EU BITs and coordinated a withdrawal from the ECT. This piece attempts to explore the potential recourses and remedies available to investors in light of the dismantling of intra-EU investor-state arbitration while […]
Katja van der Wal
33 posts
By Stephanie Nahmia* and Sam Namias** Former President of the European Central Bank (“ECB”) Mario Draghi identified, in his recent report on European competitiveness, an annual investment gap of €750-800 billion (around 4-5% of EU GDP) to decarbonize the economy and restore competitiveness in the European Union (“EU”). Current legal frameworks obstruct capital deployment through fragmented capital markets. This article dissects these barriers by exploring banking and finance law constraints on mobilizing private funds and examining regulatory fragmentation as a competition law distortion undermining the Treaty of the European Union (“TEU”). Draghi’s investment target presupposes that Europe can mobilize private […]
By: Guglielmo Triscari This piece argues that as the United States, once a primary architect of international norms, increasingly adopts an antagonistic stance toward the International Criminal Court (ICC), the durability of the 21st-century definition of justice reaches a critical existential reckoning. This approach risks establishing a “new normal” where the global legal order faces a historic confrontation between legal universalism and geopolitical dominance. Amidst this friction, the European Union has emerged as the Court’s primary defender, attempting to bridge the gap between legal ideals and geopolitical reality. By analyzing the EU’s deployment of the Blocking Statute to shield the […]
By Jeff Nielsen* Prior to Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a considered argument could be made that European Union sanctions were not only niche, but also somewhat impertinent. Enforcement actions for sanctions violations were meager and nowhere close to the estimated over 9,000 current cases pending in member states since 2022. Further, even after Russia’s 2014 “little green men” first invasion of Ukraine, then High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini emphasized in 2018 the EU’s firm, yet somewhat opaque, objection to the extraterritoriality of U.S. sanctions. Central to this objection are […]
By Peter Alexander Earls Davis* On 13 March 2026, Meta quietly announced that it would discontinue end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Instagram direct messages, effective 8 May 2026. The company’s stated rationale was low user adoption. The feature, introduced in December 2023 as an opt-in toggle available in select regions, had attracted few users. Meta’s suggestion? Move to WhatsApp. The announcement has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, but little attention has been paid to its significance under EU data protection law. The decision to remove E2EE is notable in itself, but just as important from a legal perspective is why Instagram […]
By Zachary Kimmel (Stanford Law School J.D. ’27) In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Then-Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon urged member states to educate future generations about its history. Yet in January 2018, on the eve of this observance, the Polish Parliament adopted legislation criminalizing public statements that attributed responsibility for the Holocaust to Poland. Signed into law by President Andrzej Duda, the statute threatened up to three years’ imprisonment for speech referencing individual acts of collaboration or suggesting broader Polish complicity in Nazi atrocities. It even applied extraterritorially […]
By Maria Lucia Passador I. Executive Overview and Legislative Purpose In today’s economy, digital trust is capital. Yet it is eroded daily by ransomware and supply-chain breaches. Europe’s response is Directive (EU) 2022/2555—better known as NIS 2—the most ambitious cybersecurity framework ever enacted. NIS 2 marks a turning point: it moves cybersecurity from the server room to the boardroom. Replacing and expanding the original NIS Directive, it widens the range of covered sectors, strengthens risk-management and reporting obligations, and arms regulators with sharper supervisory and enforcement tools. Its legislative purpose is unmistakable—to end the patchwork of national regimes that left […]
By Diksha Singh On 1 August 2025, the European Court of Justice delivered its ruling in Royal Football Club Seraing v FIFA (C-600/23), a decision that marks a constitutional turning point for sports arbitration within the European Union (EU). For professional athletes, this means disciplinary or transfer disputes can no longer be insulated from EU law oversight. Where the final decisions of sports tribunals clash with the EU’s basic guarantee of effective judicial protection, they must yield. Far from a narrow ruling about football, Seraing reverberates across the wider landscape of private dispute resolution. Its reasoning could reshape arbitration in […]
By Muhammad Siddique Ali Pirzada Introduction Across Europe, femicide committed by intimate partners or family members has shown a stubborn persistence. Since 2010, progress has been slow at best, and in certain regions, like Eastern Europe, the statistics remain static. In 2023, above 50% of all murdered women were killed by someone within their domestic circle. These figures are not anomalies, they reflect enduring structural and societal failures that normalize and perpetuate gender-based violence. Domestic violence is a gendered phenomenon, both in its execution and with the institutional inertia that often meets it. Still, the European Court of Human Rights […]
by Leila Medina* INTRODUCTION Compared to the estimated age of our planet, which is 4.54 billion years, the anniversary of the Columbia Journal of European Law that we celebrate today may seem infinitely small. However, 30 years is the average time it takes for most trees to reach full maturity. I am therefore delighted to join you in celebrating this significant milestone, confident in the knowledge that the Columbia Journal of European Law has been nurturing the seeds for many passionate individuals in EU Law to grow with confidence and achieve their own maturity. Therefore, in my speech today, both […]
by Pascal McDougall* ABSTRACT During the past fifteen years, many EU member states have been subject to “runs” whereby investors massively sell a country’s financial assets and trigger interest rate spikes that make the country’s debt explode. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the other EU institutions have done little to counter these debt crisis dynamics and, when they have helped indebted states, they have imposed gigantic fiscal contraction as a condition for aid. Unemployment has skyrocketed and left deep scars in the EU’s periphery. Defenders of the EU institutions’ crisis management have used arguments that are thoroughly legalized. They […]
by Federico Fabbrini* ABSTRACT The article compares the protection of human rights during the pandemic in the European Union (EU) and the United States (U.S.) by analyzing judicial review of Covid-19 measures. In particular, the article searched all available Covid-19-related rulings delivered between the start of the pandemic and 30 June 2023 by state and federal supreme courts in the U.S., and top national and supranational courts in the EU and developed an original dataset of over 300 cases. This provides the first-ever systematic analysis of judicial review of pandemic measures by apex courts in consolidated constitutional democracies. The article […]
by Antonio Aloisi* ABSTRACT The green and digital transitions are increasingly described as the “twin transition” in EU policy documents, social partners’ strategic plans and academic debates. However, the exact meaning of this term remains ambiguous, and the interconnections between these transitions are largely unexplored. This paper aims to clarify the motivations and pitfalls behind their “twinning” and assess where and how their convergence might be successful. It considers the socioeconomic risks, policy trade-offs and implications for the future of work. The analysis covers major EU employment and social policy developments concerning workers’ environmental and digital rights, as enshrined in […]
by Kayla Mathurin* & Stefanie Haller** ABSTRACT In an era marked by deepening geopolitical tensions, growing economic nationalism, and divergent regulatory paths, the transatlantic relationship between the United States and the European Union stands at a critical juncture. Long considered a cornerstone of the post-World War II international legal and political order, the US-EU partnership has traditionally been underpinned by shared liberal democratic values, open markets, and a mutual commitment to multilateralism and the rule of law. Yet recent developments from escalating trade disputes and regulatory clashes in the digital economy to diverging approaches in international arbitration and competition law […]
Ilias Bantekas* ABSTRACT The lex sportiva embodies the notion that sport governing bodies (SGBs) possess full authority to promulgate their own rules and render these binding by reason of contract to all their constituent stakeholders, including, inter alia, athletes, clubs and national federations. Their non-profit character has allowed them to attract a preferential status and enjoy financial benefits generally out of reach to ordinary commercial actors (e.g., immunities, tax privileges), even though SGBs engage in significant revenue-generating activities. This preferential status has given them a dominant place in the marketplace of mega-sporting events and until recently shielded them from any […]
by Tamas Dezso Ziegler, Balázs Horváthy, Thomas Buijnink ABSTRACT This paper elaborates on the role of legal exceptionalism in European integration from the perspective of EU Member States, with special regards to Hungary’s position. Its aim is to prove two points. First, exceptionalism is a natural consequence of increased dependency among European countries. From a legal perspective, this dependency translates into extensive regulatory practices in sensitive fields and increased pooling of sovereignty. Under such circumstances, if states disrespect EU law, they can become renegades, which is a logical consequence of intense cooperation. Second, the EU as a political community can […]
by Maria Lucia Passador* ABSTRACT The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is a landmark piece of legislation designed to regulate AI systems according to their risk levels and ensure the protection of fundamental rights. This paper focuses on the interplay between the AI Act and prudential supervision within the EU banking sector, with a particular focus on the role of the European Central Bank (ECB). The study delves into the legal framework underpinning the ECB’s supervisory responsibilities, and prudential tasks, also examining the AI governance, as well as the collaborative dynamics between the ECB, the AI Office, and the […]
Helen Jennings* ABSTRACT This paper examines a development in recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (“the Court,” “ECtHR”) regarding the prohibition of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (“Article 3,” “ECHR”). Since the 2010s, the Court has linked the prohibition of degrading treatment uniquely with the concept of human dignity.1 In cases regarding certain applicant groups, in particular women from the Roma population and LGBT+ people, the Court has used the concept of human dignity to radically expand the typical boundaries of protection offered under Article 3. This paper […]
By Aleydis Nissen* In February 2024, during the final stages of adopting the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D)—a flagship directive imposing human rights and environmental obligations on large companies in their global value chains—the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, warned that failure to pass the directive would be a “massive blow.” Fast forward to February 2025, and that blow has been delivered by the Ursula von der Leyen Commission II through an omnibus package aimed at “simplifying” the adopted CS3D in the name of “competitiveness”. The package calls for “far-reaching simplification” of CSRD, aligning […]