EU Trade Policy: Prometheus in action?
The Institute of European Law Annual Lecture 2025 was delivered by Associate Professor Dr. Luca Rubini of the University of Milan.
The 2025 lecture was delivered by Associate Professor Dr. Luca Rubini of the University of Milan on Thursday 27 November 2025 and was introduced by Professor Martin Trybus, Director of the Institute of European Law.
Luca Rubini is Associate Professor in International Law at the University of Milan, Italy, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Previously he held positions at the Law Schools of the University of Turin, University of Birmingham (where he was Reader in International Economic Law), and Leicester. He is visiting professor to the World Trade Institute (Switzerland) and the Freie Universität Berlin and visiting fellow to the Centre of European Law of King’s College London. Sometime in the past he served as legal secretary in the cabinet of Advocate General Jacobs at the European Court of Justice.
His lecture focussed on EU trade governance in these turbulent and exceptional times. It used EU action in the fields of industrial policy and competitiveness, and the fight of climate change as case-studies. The first case-study focussed on the recent EU initiatives with respect to subsidies, in particular the Foreign Subsidy Regulation (FSR) and the reconstruction of trade remedies to tackle transnational subsidies. The second case-study concentrated on the extension of the Emissions Trading System (ETS) beyond the EU via the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Drawing on the Greek myth of Prometheus, the lecture enquired whether the EU action in these fields has been ‘clever’ as well as ‘full of various wiles’ as the Greek mythological figure was believed to be. Ultimately, these two rich and salient case-studies enabled a broader assessment of recent EU trade policy, its innovations as well as its side-effects and difficulties.
The Institute of European Law was founded in 1989 and has been organising an Annual Lecture Lecture since 2001. Previous speakers include former Advocate General and the Court of Justic of the European Union Eleanor Sharpston and former Judge at the Court of First Instance Ian Forrester.