Investigating Lessons for the EU’s Fundamental Rights Policies

Elise Muir lets us know early on that her book ‘is less an essay on equality law than an enquiry into the way a supranational organization, such as the EU, develops a fundamental rights policy’.1 Equality law is chosen as the ‘case study’2 from which wider lessons will be drawn.3 Muir puts forward two main arguments in this book which can be summarised as follows: first, creating a fundamental rights policy such as that on equal treatment through legislation based on a distinct legal basis understood as giving specific expression to a fundamental right ‘creates a significant risk of over-constitutionalisation’.4 That means the political debate on the definition of fundamental rights is limited5 because such definition is too closely tied to primary law (the constitutional version of the right). Second, Muir deals with what she calls the ‘governance’ of EU equality law in domestic spheres. She maps the governance ‘infrastructure’ as set up by secondary legislation