Justin Lindeboom

Justin Lindeboom is Associate Professor of European Law at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on European constitutional law, EU and global competition law and transnational legal theory. His research was published, among others, in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review, the Yearbook of European Law, European Papers,  the Journal of Competition Law & Economics and the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice. Together with Fabian Amtenbrink, Gareth Davies and Dimitry Kochenov), he co-edited The Internal Market and the Future of European Integration (Cambridge University Press 2019), and he is currently co-editing, together with Elias Deutscher and Stavros Makris, the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook on Theoretical Foundations of Antitrust and Competition Law (Cambridge University Press 2024). Justin studied history at the University of Groningen and law at the University of Groningen, University College London and Harvard Law School. He has been an Emile Noël Fellow at New York University School of Law (2020), and has also held visiting fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg (2016), the European University Institute in Florence (2018), and University College London (2018-2019).

Contact: jl11157@nyu.edu

Research Project

Equality of States, Nullification and the Final Arbiter  in US and EU Constitutionalism. This research project focuses on the role of the equality of states in legal and political debates about nullification and the final arbiter in US antebellum constitutionalism and EU constitutionalism. The equality of the Member States of the EU has recently been invoked as a new justification for the supremacy of EU law and the interpretive supremacy of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). US antebellum constitutionalism contains a long history of debates concerning federal supremacy and the judicial supremacy of the US Supreme Court, in which the sovereign equality of the States appears to have been salient. This research project hypothesizes that debates over the final arbiter of constitutional law and the possibility of unilateral nullification in the early American republic transformed the understanding of the equality of states. While sovereign equality was initially used as an argument for the states’ right to nullify federal law, it developed into a justification for accepting the US Supreme Court as the final arbiter, and denying the right of unilateral nullification. In contrast, the equality of the member states appears not to have played a meaningful role in the development and acceptance of supremacy of EU law until very recently. This research aims to provide a comprehensive historical account, based on primary sources, of the possible role and relevance of the principle of equality of states in the development of federal supremacy in US constitutional law and the doctrine of supremacy in EU constitutional law.