About

On this page I experiment with posting content beyond the work sphere, but still related to what I do: teaching and researching the EU’s impact on Europe’s societies from a legal scholar’s perspective, and also teaching and researching EU and comparative employment law.

Professionally I am a Full Professor of EU Law and Labour Law at University College Dublin (institutional web page). I moved to UCD in November 2023, to find a home for the ERC funded project RIGHTS TO UNITE. Before I was the  Synnott Family Chair in EU Law at University College Cork (from December 2020), and retain honorary title at Queen’s University Belfast, where I was a professor of law from 2014-2020.  Having moved to the UK (more specifically the University of Leeds in Yorkshire) in 2007, after having been a professor of law for 7 years already in Germany,  after the move to Northern Ireland in November 2014  the global, national and EU developments forced any critical pro EUropean person to rethink their existence. Northern Ireland made me realise how fragile the mantle of (post) modernity was that Britain had donned from 1998 or so. In the aftermath of “Brexit” Queen’s decided to reduce teaching in EU law, and to brand all their former EU research as research in trade law. There was no space left for someone who thinks that societies do exist, that they consist of human beings, and that interaction between people is the purpose of law, economics and society… Luckily I was able to devise and obtain funding for a research project endeavouring to explore just this idea as a basis for a new socio-legal theory of European Integration – check out RIGHTS-TO-UNITE if you are interested.

So this blog is about that reflection, critique and life in general.

My German university (2000-2007) has some remnants my German existence, whereas Leeds University (2007-2014) preferred to erase most of the content I created with them.