Taming The Dark Energy Of EU Law
The Court of Justice of the European Union increasingly invokes the ‘specific and essential characteristics’ of the EU and of its law to explain the EU legal order and to justify the high demands of EU membership. Yet most of these characteristics are not provided for expressly in the EU Treaties, producing a constitutional energy that is simultaneously powerful and elusive, as well as challenges around textual invisibility, internal accountability, and external scrutiny.
'Taming the Dark Energy of EU Law' is a Leverhulme Trust-funded four-year project. It explores the unwritten constitution produced by the specific and essential characteristics of the EU and of EU law, including primacy, mutual trust, and autonomy. The project adopts a dark energy metaphor to underline how these characteristics expanded to fill empty Treaty spaces, establishing the deep structure of EU law and propelling its constitutional significance while remaining, for the most part, textually invisible – a constitutional energy detected, but not yet well understood.
The project team – at present, Principal Investigator, Niamh Nic Shuibhne and Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Eleftheria Asimakopoulou - are studying the EU’s written and unwritten constitutions in a holistic way, building on perspectives that consider the extent to which the internal and external spheres of EU action are (and should) be legally distinct. A third researcher will join the team in autumn 2025. The project is also supporting an Early Career Fellowship, held by Bob Roth.
Overall, 'Taming the Dark Energy of EU Law' aims to retune the relationship between the written and unwritten dimensions of EU constitutional law.
