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 – Principal Investigator, Niamh Nic Shuibhne; Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Eleftheria Asimakopoulou; and PhD researcher, Claire Patterson - is 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. The project is also supporting Early Career Fellowships, held by Bob Roth in 2025 and Sara Canduzzi in 2026.
Overall, Taming the Dark Energy of EU Law aims to understand how the EU’s constitution is structured and how it functions, and to retune the relationship between its and unwritten dimensions.
