Niels Stensen Fellowship awarded to Vestert Borger
A Niels Stensen Fellowship has recently been awarded to Vestert Borger. Since the 1960s, the Fellowship is awarded each year to 6 or 7 scholars at Dutch universities across all disciplines who have recently defended their doctoral dissertation. The Fellowhip enables them to conduct research abroad at a top university or institute.
The Niels Stensen Fellowship will allow Vestert to conduct research at Yale Law School, which has admitted him as a visiting scholar for the academic year 2019-2020. His research will focus on the authority of the European judge, a topic that he has started to explore in his doctoral dissertation The Transformation of the Euro: Law, Contract, Solidarity.
In the development of the European Union’s constitution, the authority of law has been crucial, and with it the authority of the Court of Justice. Recently, however, the Court’s authority has met with fresh political authority arising from the urgency of the euro crisis. When the Court had to rule on the legality of assistance to financially distressed states like Greece – essential for the survival of the currency union – it seemed to have no option but to condone political decisions already made. Such limits to the Court’s authority as a matter of fact raise an important question for European legal scholarship: to what extent are they, or should they be, also limits as a matter of law? Drawing on a comparison with the constitutional system of the United States, Vestert’s research at Yale Law School seeks to discover limits, if any, to the authority of the European judge.