How to incarcerate the nation’s media owners for 60 hours

One way to get rid of a tiresome free press is to instigate a great big purge following a (conveniently incompetent) failed coup. Another, perhaps less dramatic way, is to shut down media outlets that the government dislikes under some pretext, like broadcast licencing. While Turkey went for option a, Greece, having a less ambitious

US politicians finally agree on something (that no-one saw coming)

Many things are happening in the new populist phase of American politics. Some are less expected than others. For instance, the GOP joining forces with the left of the Democrats in asking for the restoration of Glass-Steagall was not something many saw coming. The new Republican Party platform calls for restoring the law that separated commercial-banking and

Making a success of Brexit, but for whom?

Our new Prime-Minister, Theresa May has promised to make a success of Brexit. I am sure she can do it. I am less certain it will be a success for the people of Britain though. The following expands on my recent post in The Conversation on the trade consequences of Brexit. There is strong evidence to

BVerfG and the ECB’s OMT programme

Today 21 June 2016 the BVerfG has affirmed the legality of Mario Draghi’s OMT programme. In doing so, it followed the lead of the CJEU. Nothing remarkable here, but two important issues arise: the BVerfG had initially insisted on a ban on debt restructures (no pari passu treatment of ECB held bonds in case of a sovereign

Got a state job with a fake degree? No problem

Imagine the following situation (any relation to real persons is entirely coincidental). Yorgos was not great at school. He managed to scrape through and finished with a pass mark his secondary school (the obligatory part of education in Greece) in the provincial town in Arta in western Greece. Yorgos attended, but did not finish the

What the demise of the soviets teaches us about modern day Greece

How can a weak tyrant wreck your life? One would think that a weak state is ripe for subversion or evasion, therefore, so long as one is not reliant on public services, survival should not be imperiled by the presence of a tottering regime. Yet, the experience of the soviet twilight years demonstrates how wrong

Public Interests, Private Disputes: Investment Arbitration and the Public Good

NEW PAPER at the Manchester Journal of International Economic Law, published April 2016 This paper seeks to investigate the bases for resistance to arbitration in general -and investor arbitration in particular- focusing on the way in which arbitral tribunals deal with notions of public interest and the public good. The paper hypothesises that while courts

We hope we never have a dispute

    “We hope we never have a dispute, but if we do, we agree to binding individual arbitration and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury. Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed.”  Wait, what?

Neoliberalism, Market & State in Greece

  The election of Kyriakos Mitsotakis as the leader of the opposition New Democracy has sparked a debate in Greece as to what neoliberalism is and what could be the consequence of being a neoliberal. I do not think Mitsotakis counts as a neoliberal (see the first title below) and I do not think that

De-politicisation vs De-partyfication

The Greek PM Tsipras made a speech today in which he claimed that the Syriza government aims to remove party politics from the civil service, but not to de-politicise public administration. This may sound like an odd thing to say, but it has a solid basis in a developed critique of technocracy and so-called apolitical