Amalie Frese

Income inequality is at an all-time high in the Europe Union. It threatens increasingly to destabilize ‘social Europe’ based on values such as the inseparability of social and economic progress. The economic crisis has, according to the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, a detrimental effect on the full enjoyment of rights, including access to goods and services, housing, health and education – legal guarantees under European Union Law, which are traditionally embraced by the European Social Model. Economic inequality as a consequence of the crisis is at the centre of academic attention in economics, political science and sociology. Somewhat surprisingly, however, it is practically absent from legal scholarship. This project addresses a legal-empirical question that has received little attention from scholars so far: How is the European Union’s judiciary responding to this economic divide in Europe as the supreme interpreter of EU law?