One reason for firms to voluntarily increase their environmental or social production standards is to prevent consumers from lobbying for stricter mandatory standards. In this sense, voluntary overcompliance serves as a Greek gift, as consumers might be worse off in the end. Strategically, a...

This paper explores situations where tenants in public houses, in a specific neighborhood, are given the legislated right to buy the houses they live in or can choose to remain in their houses and pay the regulated rent. This type of legislation has been passed in many European countries in the...

This discussion paper is part of a series of contributions to the conference "Towards a Grammar of Justice in EU Law', which took place on 6-7 November 2014 at VU University Amsterdam, sponsored by ACCESS EUROPE Amsterdam, VU Centre for European Legal Studies and the Dutch Research Council VENI...

The EU's central task is to improve the lives that European citizens are able to live. This mission is embedded in the EU's commitment to enhance the functioning of the internal market on the basis of the assumption that market exchanges form the primary mechanisms through which individuals...

This paper provides a conceptual analysis of the EU's legitimation status through the lens of a realist account of legitimacy. We propose a modification of Bernard Williams' theory of liberal legitimacy, and use it to make sense of the widely perceived legitimation crisis of the EU. In Williams'...

Justice is a contested concept. A more graspable version of it, it is argued in this paper, is an understanding of it in the context of what is deemed as 'injustice' rather than justice. As such, the paper takes a markedly different approach than the perspectives which have emerged so far. A...

Developing a sociological informed social theory perspective, this article asks the question why social praxis' of justification has moved to the centre-stage within the debate on transnational ordering. In contrast to perspectives which see the relationship between national and transnational...

Focusing on the expanding realm of international adjudication, this paper approaches justice from the domain of the empirical and shows - through a careful, interview-based case-study analysis in the WTO-EU context - that justice in the transnational context is not only a contested concept, but...

The paper explores the connection between the notions of justice and justification, and explains why their full comprehension enhances the legitimacy of the EU's 'Area of Freedom, Security and Justice' (AFSJ) project. The paper argues that the notion of justice, despite its contested nature,...

Public goods and human rights are sometimes treated as intimately related, if not interchangeable, strategies to address matters of common global concern. The aim of the present contribution is to disentangle the two notions to shed some critical light on their respective potential to attend to...