European Regulation Transformed: Adversarial Legalism's Muted Atlantic Crossing
![handle is hein.journals/coljeul18 and id is 167 raw text is: EUROPEAN REGULATION TRANSFORMED: ADVERSARIAL
LEGALISM'S MUTED ATLANTIC CROSSING
EUROLEGALISM: THE TRANSFORMATION OF LAW AND REGULATION IN THE
EUROPEAN UNION. By R. Daniel Kelemen, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 2011. Pp.366.
Reviewed by Peter L. Lindseth*
Dan Kelemen's new book, Eurolegalism: the Transformation of Law and
Regulation in the European Union, is a bold attempt to provide an overarching
explanation of the evolution of law and regulation in the European Union (EU)
over the last several decades.' It demonstrates a firm grasp of the integration process
across three key regulatory domains-securities regulation, competition policy, and
disability discrimination. Based on this detailed analysis, Kelemen concludes that
the emergent European regulatory system-what he calls Eurolegalism-is
converging toward a version of the dominant American style,2 what the Berkeley
political scientist Robert Kagan has dubbed adversarial legalism.3 Even for
readers not ultimately persuaded by Kelemen's comparison, this book is
undoubtedly an important contribution to the literature. Ambitious and thoughtful,
nuanced and sophisticated, Eurolegalism will serve as an essential reference point in
ongoing debates over regulatory governance in the EU.4
In Kelemen's depiction, the EU's emergent mode of regulatory governance over
the last several decades-Eurolegalism-shares several features with American
adversarial legalism: the prevalence of prescriptive legal rules, often cast as rights;
the demand for greater participation and transparency in administrative and
regulatory decision making; and the increasingly important roles for lawyers, judges,
and litigation in shaping the content of regulatory norms, whether at the formulation
or enforcement stage.' The reason why the European regulatory style is converging
' Olimpiad S. loffe Professor of International and Comparative Law, University of Connecticut
School of Law. In addition to Dan Kelemen, who provided generous comments on an earlier draft of this
review, and I would like to thank the editors of The Columbia Journal of European Law for providing
space for this innovative author-meets-author forum. Let me also thank Jeff Dunoff and the Institute for
International Law and Public Policy at Temple Law School, who initiated this exchange of reviews by
organizing two book panels in Philadelphia in October 2010 and January 2011. This forum builds on
those earlier panels, and it has been my absolute pleasure to participate in both.
1 R. DANIEL KELEMEN EUROLEGALISM: THE TRANSFORMATION OF LAW AND REGULATION IN
THE EUROPEAN UNION (2011) [hereinafter EUROLEGALISM].
2 Id. at8.
Robert A. Kagan, Adversarial Legalism and American Government, 10 J. OF POL'Y ANALYSIS
AND MGMT. 369 (1991); for more recent work, see ROBERT A. KAGAN, ADVERSARIAL LEGALISM: THE
AMERICAN WAY OF LAW (2001).
4 As an indication of its likely influence in prompting further debate, see, for example,
Francesca Bignami, Cooperative Legalism and the Non-Americanization ofEuropean Legal Styles: the
Case ofData Privacy, 59 AM. J. COMP. L. 411 (2011).
5 See generally, EUROLEGALISM, supra note 1, at ch. 3.
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European Regulation Transformed: Adversarial Legalism's Muted Atlantic Crossing
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