Law and Soft Power

York Hall B215. Discussants: Profs. Dagmar Soennecken and Anna Triandafyllidou

An Analysis of the Authority of the European Court of Justice

Jada Kinnaird

This paper will begin to analyze the rise of ECJ authority within the European Union. It will discuss the ways in which the European Court of Justice came to be a powerful supranational institution in a union made up of sovereign states. Comparisons will be made in particular to the Canadian legal system to show how law is dispensed within a nation in contrast to how law is dispensed between nations. The goal is to display how power dynamics have a direct influence on the legal interactions that occur within the European Union. The ECJ finds itself thus in a position where the lines blur between law and politics.

I am a fourth year political science student at Glendon. I have a particular interest in foreign policy and globalization and hope to learn about this through the symposium.

Brexit and the Unified Patent Court before International Investment Tribunals

Riccardo Vecellio Segate

Tensions between the EU’s legal order and the international investment law regime are not exclusive to the “Brexit” era, but they certainly gained momentum in the aftermath of this referendum. By incautiously declaring that the UK will remain a party to the Unified Patent System regardless of Brexit, the British government arguably shaped (il)legitimate expectations on the part of investors who aimed at exploiting their intellectual property rights in the UK while benefitting from the judicial protection of the forthcoming Unified Patent Court as much as of the European institutions (and market) as a whole. Indeed, not only the System itself will undergo a process of major rebalancing after London’s departure from the EU, but more importantly, the UK will most probably be unable to retain its membership in the System after the actual delivery of Brexit. These complications trigger a wide spectrum of fundamental dilemmas investing the definition and scope of concepts such as unilateral declaration, indirect expropriation, reasonable expectation, estoppel, and public policy exception, under both EU law and international investment law. It is therefore essential to explore these intersections as to anticipate possible scenarios in the event of both domestic court and international arbitral claims lodged by patent investors pre- and post-Brexit, having due regard for competition concerns on the side of the EU, yet referring to recent Canadian case-law (namely, Eli Lilly) which opened the gate to investor-State claims in the field of intellectual property.

Riccardo Vecellio Segate is PhD Candidate in International Law at the University of Macau and Incoming Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Law and Technology of The University of Hong Kong as well as at the School of Law of Tsinghua University (Beijing). He holds an LLM in Public International Law from Utrecht University, PGDip in European and Global Governance from the University of Bristol, Erasmus+ Visiting MMus at the University of Leeds, Diploma in Humanitarian Intervention at ISPI Milan. Consultant for private companies, NGOs and international organisations for issues of cybersecurity, data protection, intellectual property, and cultural heritage.

Justifying the European Central Bank’s unconventional monetary policy from the perspective of “neutrality”: ECB’s cases for CSPP and PSPP

Morgane Delorme

The 2007-2008 financial crisis imposed an extended and deep transformation of monetary policy features, notably as the European Central Bank (ECB) engaged into extensive market-interventionist policies, and developed a whole range of new tools in order to save and secure the threatened continuation of the Eurozone. In this paper, I propose to examine a particular wording of the ECB’s communications which served as a justification for several recent quantitative easing programmes, launched by the ECB between 2015 and 2018. This paper calls upon classical distinctions we inherit from philosophy and political liberals regarding the controversial principle of “neutrality” in order to challenge the somewhat intriguing justification that has been given to recent asset purchase programmes. I will focus in particular on two sets of programmes, name the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) and the Corporate Sector Purchase Programme (CSPP), which received justifications via the market neutrality principle. Invoking “market neutrality” in this context seems problematic for at least two sets of reasons. Firstly, this criteria may not be sufficient to disqualify the ECB’s market-interventions from the range of political economy measures, although the “neutrality” wording may suggest it does. Indeed, from a consequentialist point of view, one would worry that the neutrality of the institutions’ intentions be treated equal to the neutrality of the observed economic consequences or effects. The “neutrality” of effects does not follow from the “neutrality” of motivations. Secondly, this lexical use of “neutrality” seems to foster a problematic confusion regarding what the ECB would precisely be expected to do, or keep from doing, in terms of distribution-meddling. It appears the expansion of asset purchase programmes, since the beginning of the crisis, raises unresolved issues on the evolution of the ECB’s self-understanding of its role as an independent agency. Regarding its appeal to the notion of “neutrality”, I believe contemporary literature in political philosophy may be of use to help confront the institution’s reasoning with a consequentialist perspective of what it means to commit to neutral. In the particular cases of PSPP and CSPP, if our enquiry simply begins on the edge of what seems to be a wording-misapprehension, it is however worth noting that the attached political consequences of such a puzzling justification remains far from trivial, in terms of both what it ignores and what it allows, notably as far as environmental and distributional aspects are concerned.

Graduate from M.A.(research) in European Affairs (major in Law and Economics) from Sciences Po Paris, and M.A. (research) in Contemporary Philosophy (major in Philosophy of Economics) from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-Paris). PhD candidate since September 2018 (cotutelle), under the supervision of Pr Peter DIETSCH, departement of Philosophy, University of Montreal (Canada) and the supervision of Pr Arnauld LECLERC, department of Political Science, University of Nantes (France). Research interests in European studies, political economy, political philosophy and ethics. The dissertation will focus on the European Central Bank and the study of its justifications regarding unconventional monetary policy (post-2008) from a contractualist and liberal-egalitarian perspective, inspired by readings of John Rawls’ theory of justice and post-rawlsian ideas on institutions of the basic structure of society.