Alezini Loxa is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in EU law at Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on EU law, legal history, constitutionalism and fundamental rights protection.
She holds a PhD in EU law from Lund University, Sweden and an LL.M. and LL.B. from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. During her PhD studies she was a visiting researcher at the European University Institute, Leiden University, Radbound University and the Hertie School.
Alezini’s PhD thesis was awarded the 2023 Oscar II Prize for best thesis in the Lund Faculty of Law, the 2024 Lund University Agenda 2030 Honourable mention for interdisciplinary research on sustainable development by early career scholars, and the EGLP 2024 Thesis Prize for the best doctoral public law thesis characterized by its European dimension. A revised version of her dissertation has been published as a monograph with the title Sustainability and EU Migration Law, Tracing the History of a Contemporary Concept (CUP 2025).
She is the managing editor of the Nordic Journal of European Law, an open-access and peer reviewed journal of European law with a Nordic perspective and a board member of the European Law Moot Court (ELMC) Society, which organises ELMC Competition -the most prestigious moot court competition within the field of EU Law and one of the most important moot court competitions in the world.
At Lund, Alezini is involved in the teaching of various courses at different cycles of legal education, including the Swedish Law Programme, Advanced Elective Courses, and the European Business Law and International Human Rights Law Master’s programs. She also coordinates a course on European Fundamental Rights Protection.
Contact: al10036@nyu.edu
Research Project
Revisiting the Normative Foundations of EU Migration Law.
In EU politics migration is presented both as the reason behind national unemployment and as the key solution to long-term economic survival due to the fast-ageing European population. This paradox, indicative of the contentious nature of migration, goes hand in hand with a legal paradox. While EU law is built on a fundamental distinction between privileged EU citizens and excluded third country nationals, in practice all non-EU migrants falling under secondary law enjoy the full application of the Charter, which is not the case for destitute EU citizens. This legal paradox eludes all the theoretical accounts proposed to this day on the normative foundations of EU migration law.
The purpose of this project is to revisit the normative foundations of EU migration law by situating the relevant law and case-law in various constitutional theories and exposing their shortcomings. Specifically, the project employs a combination of doctrinal analysis and critical theory to examine EU law and case law on free movement, labor migration, student mobility, and irregular migration. In so doing it unravels a complicated hierarchy of statuses within EU migration law, whereby nationality, race and class influence both the attribution and the restriction of rights. Such intersections cannot be fully explained by different theories which have attempted to capture the normative underpinnings of EU law in general (cosmopolitan constitutionalism, post-national constitutionalism, functional constitutionalism) and EU migration law specifically.
The dichotomy of ‘us’ vs ‘them’ that EU law scholarship takes for granted today, looks more like a continuum characterized by variable levels of openness and closure dependent on race, class and the economic need of specific types of labour. After unpacking how constitutional theories on EU law fail to capture the legal reality of migration, the project suggests that the intersecting economic and racial ordering entrenched in EU migration law can be best captured through the theoretical lens of racial capitalism.