Ferdinand Wollenschläger
Tuesday, 2 May 2023, 11am-noon, Glendon College (Senior Common Room - Petit Salon, York Hall 310)

The year 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of Union citizenship and the Union citizens’ right to free movement attached to it, both institutionalised with the Treaty of Maastricht which entered into force on 1 November 1993. In view of this occasion, the lecture will on the one hand explore the development of free movement of Union citizens in the last 30 years, a core guarantee of EU law, daily exercised by millions of EU citizens, but also subject to fierce legal and political debates, notably in view of migration of economically inactive Union citizens and their claim to social solidarity in other Member States. On the other hand, the lecture will put Union citizenship and the Union citizens’ right to free movement into the broader perspective of EU integration and explore this guarantee (i) as a new fundamental freedom beyond market integration, (ii) in the wider context of free movement in Europe and with regard to its relationship with (iii) Union Citizenship and (iv) fundamental rights protection.

Professor Wollenschläger holds a chair for Public Law, European Law, and Public Economic Law at the University of Augsburg, where he also serves as Dean of the law school. He also acts as Director of the Institute of Public Law and as Co-Director of both the Institute for Bio, Health and Medical Law and of the ACELR (Augsburg Center for Global Economic Law and Regulation). He teaches courses on European Union, constitutional, and administrative law. Besides his dissertation (on EU citizenship and free movement) he has co-authored monographs on contracts in planning law and on same-sex marriage, co-edited books on Public Economic Law and on the Public Law of Bavaria, and published articles on EU Fundamental Rights, Union Citizenship, the Internal Market (Free Movement of Persons, Public Procurement) and further issues of EU and national economic law, European and national administrative law, federalism-related issues of German Constitutional Law, constitutional issues of Germany’s participation in European integration, health law and on the conflict of fundamental rights regimes in the European multilevel system.