Research

Constitutional law is the foundation of every legal system. It creates and regulates the powers, institutions and structures of government, the relations between the branches of government and the relations between the state and the individual.

The department’s constitutional law section is specialized in two main areas of constitutional research. A significant part of the section’s research deals with institutional questions regarding the relation between parliaments and the executive, which includes major themes such as representative democracy, legislation, political accountability and parliamentary control. The Maastricht constitutional law section has developed a distinctly comparative and European approach to constitutional research. Many of the section’s research activities in this area are conducted within the Maastricht branch of the Montesquieu Institute for European and comparative parliamentary studies, of which the Department of Public Law is one of the founding partners.

The other area of specialized research within the constitutional law section has traditionally been the study of fundamental rights. Major themes of current research are the mechanisms of fundamental rights protection at the European level and the development of positive obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights.

Many research projects are carried out in cooperation with other constitutional researchers within the inter-university Ius Commune Research School.

 

The administrative law research carried out by the members of the Department of Public Law focuses on three main themes: firstly, the exercise of delegated powers by European administrative authorities, such as the European Commission and EU agencies, and by private actors (as is the case for the European standardization process), as well as the process of soft law-making and the notion of administrative networks at national and European level. The research carried out within this first stream focusses on the legality and legitimacy of these processes and their compliance with European (administrative) law principles.  Secondly, research is carried out with respect to the role of local authorities and cities, focusing on their cooperative structures and interconnections with other levels of government, especially in addressing current societal challenges, such as climate change or sustainable mobility. The third stream of research concerns access to justice and in general judicial review of European and national administrative action, particularly with respect to multi-level administrative cooperation, and the question of compliance with the right to fair trial under Article 6 ECHR and the right to an effective remedy as guaranteed by Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The question of judicial protection against the administration is studied also in the specific Dutch context. Furthermore, the process of Europeanisation of national administrative law is studied, as well as the emergence of a body of transnational administrative law (especially as induced by EU law).

Substantively, the members of the Department of Public Law carry out research in environmental law, EU agro-food policy, mobility as well as EU and comparative competition law and State aid.

Many of the research activities in these areas are conducted within the Maastricht Center for European Law (MCEL) and the Globalization and Law Network (GLaw).

The question of how the current drive for flexibility in the labour market can be combined with adequate levels of income and employment security for all (potential) workers is a key topic of the European Employment and Flexicurity Strategy. A significant part of the research activities of the social law section of the Department of Public Law deals with the legal implications of this topic, thereby seeking the interaction between labour law, company law and social security law. The section’s research activities in this field focus, inter alia, on reviewing legal reforms which aim to strike a balance between the economic objective of increasing labour supply in ways that promote competitiveness and economic growth and the social objective of ensuring that vulnerable groups are offered effective support to enter and progress in the labour market. The research activities include questions with regard to labour migration issues, thereby paying particular attention to the legal position of migrant workers, for example, in the case of collective redundancy or the transfer of undertakings and with regard to their social security rights. In addition, the social law section performs research in the area of collective labour law. In this context, the section’s activities concentrate, inter alia, on the question of whether the legal framework for collective labour law agreements is in need of a revision in view of the growing interest of employers to define the terms of employment at the company level and the decreasing interest of workers to join with the trade unions.

The research activities of the social law section of the Department of Public Law are conducted within the Ius Commune Research School under the joint research programmes ‘Contract Law’, ‘Corporate entities in Europe’ and ‘Liability and Insurance’. Within these programmes the members of the social law section cooperate with researchers specialised in private and company law and with members of the faculty’s research institute METRO.