Abstract

In May 2020, the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court has handed down a thundering decision: for the first time in history, the Court of an EU Member State has declared to not be bound by a decision of the European Court of Justice. The Second Senate ruled that the ECB had to better explain it decisions in the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP); if not, Germany would have to withdraw from the ECB.
The paper will analyse this landmark decision considering its context and its implications for European integration. Of particular interest is the methodological approach in the proportionality test. The paper argues that the German Court adopts an inherently German proportionality test for the interpretation of EU law.

Biography

Anna Katharina Mangold is professor of European Law at Europa-University Flensburg since 2019. Having studied in Freiburg, Berlin, Frankfurt and Cambridge (UK), Katharina wrote her PhD thesis about the Europeanisation of German Law (Deutsches Recht und Gemeinschaftsrecht, Mohr Siebeck, 2011). In her second book, she advances a legitimation of antidiscrimination law between private parties as precondition of deliberative democracies (Demokratische Inklusion durch Recht, Mohr Siebeck, 2020). Recent articles cover European constitutional law, the history of public law, civil and human rights, legal gender studies and antidiscrimination law.