The Internal Market Ideal is an essay collection honouring Professor Stephen Weatherill. A reference to his seminal work The Internal Market as a Legal Concept (OUP, 2016), this volume celebrates Weatherill's scholarship and examines the legal issues surrounding the semi-integrated market of the European Union.

An inquiry into the internal market as an ambiguous legal concept, this volume will consider the vertical distributions of competences between the EU and its Member States and the horizontal distribution of powers between the Court and the legislative institutions of the EU.

While the internal market has been at the heart of the European project from the very beginning, it has rarely been the subject of sustained and comprehensive scholarly examination in its entirety. In the face of profound legal, political and policy pressures, this timely Research Handbook reflects on the cutting-edge issues, horizontal themes and the big questions which illuminate the shape of the internal market. It places the law and policy of the internal market within the context of the financial crisis and the existential questions this has raised for future European integration.

Evidence taken before Sub-committee B (Internal Market)

How can the concept of abuse of European Union law – which can be defined as undesirable choice of law artificially made by a private citizen – generate so much disagreement among equally intelligent individuals? Seeking to transcend the classical debate between its supporters and adversaries, the present study submits that the concept of abuse of EU law is located on three major fault-lines of EU law, which accounts for the well-established controversies in the field. The first fault-line, which is common to all legal orders, opposes legal congruence (the tendency to yield equitable legal outcomes) to legal certainty (the tendency to yield predictable legal outcomes). Partisans of legal congruence tend to advocate the prohibition of abuses of law, whereas partisans of legal certainty tend to oppose it. The second fault-line is specific to EU law and divides two conceptions of the regulation of the internal market. If economic integration is conceived as the promotion of cross-border competition among private businesses (the paradigm of 'regulatory neutrality'), choices of law must be proscribed as abusive, for they distort business competition. But if economic integration is intended to promote competition among Member States (the paradigm of 'regulatory competition'), choices of law by EU citizens represent a desirable process of arbitrage among national laws. The third and final fault-line corresponds to the tension between two orientations of the economic constitution of the European Union, namely the fear of private power and the fear of public power. Those who fear private power most tend to endorse the prohibition of abuses of law, whereas those who fear public power most tend to reject it. Seen in this way, the concept of abuse of EU law offers a forum in which fundamental questions about the nature and function of EU law can be confronted and examined in a new light. In May 2013, the thesis that this book was based on won the First Edition of the European Law Faculties Association Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis.

Il libro costituisce un’introduzione al diritto del mercato interno europeo ed illustra e analizza l’evoluzione della disciplina del mercato interno e le sue caratteristiche e categorie giuridiche principali (Cap. 1 – Raffaele Torino), la libera circolazione delle merci (Cap. 2 – Federico Raffaele), la libera circolazione delle persone (Cap. 3 – Filippo Palmieri), la libera prestazione dei servizi e il diritto di stabilimento (Cap. 4 – Arianna Paoletti) e la libera circolazione dei capitali e dei pagamenti (Cap. 5 – Ilaria Ricci).

This edited collection explores the legal foundations of the single market project in Europe,and examines the legal concepts and constructs which underpin its operation. While an apparently well-trodden area of EU law, such is the rapid evolution of the European Court's case law that confusion persists as to the meaning of core concepts. The approach adopted is a thematic one, with each theme being explored in the context of the different freedoms. The themes covered include discrimination, horizontality, mutual recognition, market access, pre-emption and harmonization, enforcement, mandatory requirements, flexibility, subsidiarity and proportionality. Separate chapters explore the link between competition law and the single market, the rapidly evolving case law on capital, and the external dimension of the single market. Contributors also address the WTO dimension, and its important implications for the single market project in Europe.