It's now my pleasure to introduce Professor Catherine Barnard, who probably does not need

any introduction. Nevertheless, I shall faithfully discharge my duty. And so, Appren is a professor

of law here at the faculty, specializing in EU and labor law.

He's also the director of the Center for European Legal Studies

and a senior fellow and deputy director of UK in a changing Europe and many, many more wonderful things.

But I shall leave it at that.

And she will be speaking to us on the wound of law and the EU single market.

So thank you very much and hope it to UK.

Well, thank you very much.

I just want to start by thanking thebill for initiating this seminar.

Nobil is doing quite remarkable things and we're very fortunate to have him as a colleague

here.

Now he's asked me to talk about the rule of law and the single market and I'm very mindful of the overall theme of the seminar,

which is about the potential unifying but also disunifying effect of the rule of law. And it's that

latter dimension that I'm particularly interested in. So I want to think about the relationship between the rule of law and the single market.

And I want to ask a question which is probably unpalatable for an audience of lawyers,

which is it possible to have a functioning single market which is not fully underpinned by the rule of law?

Now what I'm going to argue is that the purest adherence to the need to comply with the rule of law may well have negative externalities.

And I argue that in the context of what's happening in Poland at the moment,

under the Tusk government, who are really trying to get things back on track.

But given what has gone before, this is proving very difficult.

And I will explain all of this in a moment. And so essentially what I want to argue is I think there

...