Darinka Piqani lectures EU law and conducts research in the field of European constitutional law.

More information about Darinka Piqani

Darinka Piqani is Assistant Professor of EU law at the Europa Institute of Leiden Law School. She is also visiting professor at the Law Faculty of Université Catholique, Lille.

She studied law in Tirana (2004) and afterwards worked for one year as a practising lawyer in one of the leading law firms in Albania. Subsequently, she studied comparative constitutional law at Central European University, Budapest (2006) and obtained her PhD title at the Department of Law of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2010). In the PhD thesis “Supremacy of EU Law and the Jurisprudence of Constitutional Reservations in Central Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans: Towards a "Holistic" Constitutionalism”, Darinka investigated constitutional reservations developed in the jurisprudence of constitutional courts in Central Eastern European countries that entered the EU in 2004 and 2007. Her work has been published in edited volumes, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law, The Oxford Encyclopedia of European Union Law, the European Constitutional Law Review, the Common Market Law Review, Nederlands Juristenbald.

Darinka’s original area of research is the relation between Member States and the EU, and more specifically the relation between national constitutional courts and the Court of Justice. In this line of research, she has explored constitutional reservations by constitutional courts in the Member States and emerging concepts such as national (constitutional) identity.  The second line of research is the legal dimension of EU enlargement, rule of law reforms in candidate countries (with special focus on Albania), and constitutional space in (constitutions of) candidate countries that make possible full accession to the EU and the application of the EU legal order. A third emerging line of research is internal market law, specifically from the perspective of the limits that EU law imposes on Member State regulatory autonomy.

Darinka has been engaged as expert in various projects for the European Parliament, IOM (advising the Albanian government in the process of EU approximation, April 2021-September 2021); Balkans Policy Research Group, Kosovo (acting as senior expert in the  Research Policy Paper on the Review of the Constitution of Kosovo, April 2021-September 2022); Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Academic coordinator for Leiden University in the Matra Rule of Law Training Programme II); Civil Rights Defenders, Albania (acting as expert in drafting guidelines for EU candidate countries for litigation before the Court of Justice of EU and the application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights).

She has been member of the research team in the project “The Challenge of Enforcing Rule of Law in International Organizations: Winning the Public and Resisting Populist Attacks”, supported by a seed grant of the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) Initiative of Leiden University; coordinator of an ICM Erasmus+ programme of exchange between Leiden University and University of Tirana, (2019-2022); fellow researcher and lecturer at the University of Tirana in the READ (Research Expertise from the Academic Diaspora) project “Right to information in Albania: Decisions of the Commissioner on the Right to Information and Data Protection and court practice”, funded the Albanian-American Development Foundation (June 2022-July 2023); lecturer on Ch. 23 at the Academy of European Integration and Negotiations, European Movement Albania. Since 2021, she is the vice chair of the Accreditation Board of Higher Education in Albania.

Darinka teaches in EU institutional law and EU internal market law at bachelor's and master's level and supervises bachelor's and master's theses.

Research areas:

• The relationship between national constitutional law and EU law and the position of constitutional courts; limits to constitutional adjudication.  
• The legal dimension of EU enlargement, especially in the new geopolitical context; rule of law reforms with a particular interest on the judiciary; the legal architecture of (economic) integration in the Western Balkans and its interaction with EU enlargement
• The constitutional dimension of the internal market with special interest on the limits to Member State regulatory autonomy. The Services Directive as a case study of constitutional issues such as the relation between primary and secondary law; scope of restrictions; the role of the Court of Justice; limits to Member State autonomy.