Research and other activities

The main research interests are European constitutional law, the interplay between EU law and national law, European economic law and legal theory. The largest ongoing research projects are:

•     Comparative Fiscal Federalism. Lessons to be Learned for the EU (2019-22), director and collaboration. In response to the financial and sovereign debt crisis, measures have been introduced in the EU that can evolve into a system of fiscal federalism as known from federal states. Drawing on the relevant experiences in Australia, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Austria, Switzerland and the USA, proposals are developed for fiscal instruments in the EU that are efficient in everyday practice and can be expected to preclude future sovereign debt crises and ensure an equitable distribution of burdens and revenues, while ensuring a level of democratic control that can be expected from a developed polity in the 21st century.

•      Member States’ Constitutions and EU Integration, director and collaboration.The constitutional foundations and limits of the 27 EU member states and the United Kingdom are examined for further European integration. For each of these countries, there is a report prepared by national experts along a uniform outline and after joint discussion. On the basis of these reports, the perspective for a further deepening of the European unification process will be analysed in a summary-continuing contribution.The results of the project will be presented to the public in 2021 in a volume to be published by Hart Publishers, Oxford/UK.

•      The Choice for Europe since Maastricht. Member States’ Preferences for Economic and Financial Integration (2015 – 2019), Horizon 2020, co-coordinator of this mainly political science-based international project at SCEUS, which was conducted under the direction of Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann. The jurisprudential part analyses the national constitutional framework conditions for the fiscal policy of the Member States and the EU with the aim of identifying perspectives for the further development of the Economic and Monetary Union. The results of the project were published in early 2021 in the volume “EMU Integration and Member States’ Constitutions” (Oxford, Hart, 726 pp), co-edited with Elisabeth Lentsch.