I defended my doctoral dissertation The European Constitution and the Eurozone Crisis: A Critique of European Constitutional Pluralism in November 2017. The purpose of the dissertation was to combine two topical discussions in European constitutionalism: the substantive discussion on the Eurozone crisis and the theoretical discussion on constitutional pluralism. In practice, I studied two things. First, what types of legal reactions the European Union took to combat the financial and debt crisis that erupted in 2008. Second, how EU law, specifically the crisis response measures, were subjected to judicial review in the Member States, what types of differences there are in such national procedures, and what significance these measures have for the EU as supranational polity. The dissertation was an assessment of the main claims of constitutional pluralism through case studies, which were formed by the crisis response measures and their review by national courts and the Court of Justice.

My current work focuses on the following themes:

• European constitutionalism: Interaction between the Member States’ constitutional orders and the European Union’s constitutional order and the interface between law and politics, often from a comparative perspective.
• Economic and Monetary Union: Constitutional aspects of the development of the Economic and Monetary Union.
• Legal theoretical and social scientific approaches to the study of the EU law: How to increase our understanding of the EU as a polity and EU law through legal theory, social theory and political economy.
• Knowledge-based society and knowledge-based decision making: How the paradigm of a knowledge-based society often masks the use of power into the supposedly neutral application of scientific expert knowledge, and how this poses problems with regards to the judicial application of law and judicial review.

My work has been published in top journals such as the Common Market Law Review and the European Law Review. I have been a visiting researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Law and Governance (Amsterdam), the European University Institute (Florence), the Europa Institute (Leiden) and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg). I have delivered expert opinions to the Finnish Parliament’s Constitutional Law Committee and the Grand Committee (i.e. committee of EU affairs) on issues related to the development of the Economic and Monetary Union. I have co-authored the leading Finnish textbook on EU law (Juha Raitio – Tomi Tuominen: Euroopan unionin oikeus. Alma Talent, 2020. xxvi+995 pp).

I am available for consultations and interviews relating to the Economic and Monetary Union, constitutional aspects of EU law, and the effects of EU membership on the Finnish Constitution.

Updated 10 June 2020.