Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
Professor Takis Tridimas, Founding Director of the Luxembourg Centre for European Law (LCEL), was recently invited to speak at two prestigious international judicial conferences.
On 18 September 2025, Professor Tridimas delivered the keynote address at the Annual Conference of the EFTA Court, held in the Salle Panoramique of the Hemicycle building in Luxembourg.
The event brought together more than 180 participants, including presidents and members of supreme courts from EFTA States, judges and advocates general from the European Court of Justice and the General Court of the EU, representatives of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as practitioners, academics, and other experts.
In his keynote, titled “The many faces of an internal market: Lessons from Europe and beyond,” Professor Tridimas examined different legal and political understandings of the concept of the internal market and their salient features; he discussed the models of positive and negative integration by reference to the laws of the European Union, the United States, Canada and Australia. He compared the interpretation of the harmonisation clause of Article 114 TFEU by the CJEU with the interpretation of the commerce clause of the US Constitution by the US Supreme Court and drew also comparisons with the case law of commonwealth courts focusing on the role of proportionality as a judicial tool .
Professor Tridimas’s address was followed by questions from the audience and a lively discussion on for example the difference of regulatory tools in the EU and US and how the political context can influence the outcome of court decisions.
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© EFTA Court 2025
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© EFTA Court 2025
Just weeks later, on 2–3 October 2025, Professor Tridimas was among the distinguished speakers at the International Scientific Conference “The Relationship Between National Law and European Union Law – XIV Constitutional Days”, hosted by the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic and the Faculty of Law of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.
His presentation, “Judicial balancing of competing rights and interests: What role for the CJEU?” addressed the evolving function of the CJEU in balancing conflicting rights and interests in the post-Lisbon Treaty era. He provided a taxonomy of factors that the Court takes or should take into account in carrying out such balancing. He explored the proper limits of judicial power in a democracy and the special role of supra-national courts, i.e. the CJEU and the European Court of Human Rights.