EU Law and Economics

Abstract

This book examines the design and evolution of European law from the perspective of economics. It draws on various branches of the economic sciences—including rational choice and game theory, and institutional and behavioural economics—to expand our understanding of EU law and its effects. It seeks to complement doctrinal research on EU law by generating insights that are typically ignored in discussions of legal doctrine—including why the EU Treaties are designed as they are, how the Treaties and secondary EU law should be crafted, and how EU rules should be interpreted. While legal scholars draw on a range of interpretive methods, economics furnishes an alternative set of tools for explaining core legal principles such as conferral, subsidiarity, and mutual recognition. The law considers the actions of EU institutions in terms of their competences and instruments; economics, by contrast, can shed light on underlying motive dynamics—that is, on why Union institutions behave as they do within existing legal frameworks. This book devotes attention to EU Treaties and secondary law, as well as their adjudicative interpretation. The aim of the book is not to correct or revise existing legal perspectives, but rather to offer additional descriptive and normative metrics that expand our understanding of various issues, including in particular the decision-making behaviour of EU institutions and Member States. The book vividly demonstrates the immense value of harnessing the multifarious tools and methods of economics to analyse various issues in EU law, not least in relation to current reform debates.