R. Daniel Kelemen

On his book Eurolegalism: The Transformation of Law and Regulation in the European Union

Cover Interview of September 18, 2011

In a nutshell

Europe’s legal and regulatory landscape is changing.

Historically, regulation through litigation was unheard of in European democracies. The United States was the land of “adversarial legalism,” famous—or perhaps infamous—for its activist courts, rapacious lawyers, class action lawsuits, massive damage awards, and more generally litigious, adversarial relations between government, industry and interest groups. In west European democracies, by contrast, approaches to regulation were much more informal, cooperative and opaque, as closed, insider networks of bureaucrats and regulated interests developed regulatory policy in concert, with little influence from courts and private litigants.

Eurolegalism explores how and why the process of European integration is transforming traditional patterns of law and regulation across Europe.

While we are certainly not witnessing a convergence of the two systems, it is clear that patterns of law and regulation in the European Union (EU) are shifting toward a distinctive European variant of American legal style—what I call “Eurolegalism.”

European integration plays a central role in driving this transformation. The EU’s fragmented political structure and its project of market integration encourage policy makers to enact more and more detailed, judicially enforceable rules—often framed as individual rights—and to back them with the threat of enforcement litigation by public authorities or private actors.

europe / law / public policy / political science / european union / litigation / consumer rights / european court of justice / airline industry / european commission /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009