Preface

This book owes its existence to a number of factors, most importantly the persistent requests of my students both at the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University and at Bocconi University in Milan for a simple and readable, and preferably short, introduction to the law of the European Union. It was, and remains, a particular challenge to teach EU law in institutions with mostly economics and political science students, who are not always wholly enthusiastic about learning the law. That made me realise that there is a lack of available academic resources for this particular purpose. Of course, there are the excellent treatises such as EU Law by Craig and De Burca, now already in its fifth edition (2011), and the second edition of European Union Law by Chalmers, Hadjiemmanuil, Monti and Tomkins (2010), as well as a number of other first-rate law books – needless to say, not always a light fare even for law students. The students at my home law school at the University of Vienna equally demanded access to learning the law in a most time-efficient manner.

Being brief on EU law is, of course, like squaring the circle, with the additional, hermeneutic complication that it is almost impossible to understand anything fully without first understanding everything, at least a little. This book has been written against all these odds. It aims at explaining the most important institutional aspects of the European Union, the interplay of its main bodies in the process of European legislation, the control of legality exercised by the two EU courts, the importance of fundamental rights in this context and the role of the EU as an international actor. It equally tries to familiarise the reader with the most important aspects of so-called substantive EU law, that is, the law of the four freedoms, in particular, the free movement of goods in the internal market and the freedom rights of EU citizens as workers, self-employed and family members. In addition, a number of other EU policies, such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), environmental and consumer protection, Social Policy and Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters (PJCC) are outlined, while a more detailed inquiry is made into European competition law.