Constitutional Pluralism in the European Union: A Critical Reassessment

• Department of Law

A comprehensive and critical analysis of one of the most popular and prolific strands in European legal scholarship, i.e., constitutional pluralism.

The thesis seeks to challenge the central claim advanced by pluralist scholars with regard to the legal structure of the European Union: namely that the relationship between the EU and national legal orders is best conceptualized and understood as a heterarchical rather than hierarchical one.

To that purpose, the thesis examines the work of leading scholars of pluralism––Neil MacCormick, Kaarlo Tuori, Mattias Kumm, and Miguel Poiares Maduro–– all of whom advanced such heterarchical rather than hierarchical understandings of the aforesaid relationship.

In so doing, the thesis attempts to address two main questions: first, does pluralism succeed in offering a descriptively and analytically sound account of the common European legal ordering; and second, how do the traditional, positivist, and hierarchical accounts of law fare in comparison with their pluralist contenders?