Viking, Laval and Beyond

EU Law in the Member States is a new series dedicated to exploring the impact of landmark CJEU judgments and secondary legislation in legal systems across the European Union. Each book will be written by a team of generalist EU lawyers and experts in the relevant field, bringing together perspectives from a wide range of different Member States in order to compare and analyse the effect of EU law on domestic legal systems and practice.

The first volume focuses on the uneasy relationship between the economic freedoms enshrined in Articles 49 and 56 TFEU and the right of workers to take collective action. This conflict has been at the forefront of EU labour law since the CJEU’s much-discussed decisions in C-438/05 Viking and C-341/05 Laval, as well as the Commission’s more recent attempts at legislative reforms in the failed Monti II Regulation. Viking, Laval and Beyond explores judicial and legislative responses to these measures in 10 Member States, and finds that the impact on domestic legal systems has been much more varied than traditional accounts of EU law would suggest.