Positive Action in Community Law

This article analyses the ECJ ruling in the Kalanke case, which also constitutes the Court's first ruling on positive action (known as affirmative action in the USA). The author criticises the narrow approach taken by the Court, which considers positive action as an exception to equal treatment, thus prioritising a merely formal notion of equality as the basis of EU anti-discrimination law. She develops a more coherent notion by conceptualising equality as a substantive concept, which then means that positive action is a necessary element of equality law. This is the author's first publication in English (readers whose native language is English should recall when they published their first article in another world language at this stage - this author only managed to do so at the age of 33, after having been in academia for 2 years as a senior lecturer).