EU Views: Vlad Perju
Name: Vlad Perju
Nationality: Romanian
Occupation(s): Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College and Professor of Law at Boston College Law School; Research Fellow and Co-Chair of Harvard’s CES’ EU Law Study Group; served as a member of Romania’s Presidential Commission on Constitutional Reform
Connection to Europe: European citizen; research interests centered upon European Union law, comparative constitutional law and theory, international and comparative law and jurisprudence; observer of constitutional developments and authoritarianism in Eastern Europe (particularly Romania)
Date of interview: May 25, 2016
This episode is a conversation with Vlad Perju, a Romanian Professor of Law at Boston College Law School, who identifies and addresses the two conflicting projects of European integration: one based upon fusion and unity, the other centered on cooperation and coordination of Member States. He talks about the challenge of European versus national law, and highlights some of the discontinuities in the goals of European integration, including the major issue of the continued existence of nation states without nationalism. Perju discusses how legal documents encapsulate the conflicting political project in the EU, and how the paradigm of the constitutionalization in Europe has two lenses (doctrinal and normative) which European lawyers must use in the reformation of European law in order to promote the active involvement of citizens in the European integration experiment.