The event took place in the prestigious Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies. It was opened by the Centre’s Director, Benigno Pendás, and then President of the European Law Institute, Diana Wallis. 

Wallis and Pendás highlighted the distinctively challenging moment that Europe faces and the role that the European legal community has to play in responding to those challenges. One of the coordinators of the Spanish Hub, Carmen Jerez Delgado, Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid and member of the ELI Council at the time, led the event.

Professor Rafael Illescas, member of the ELI Council, presented ELI to the audience. He has been involved in it since its creation. The first roundtable of the event, focused on the interaction between European law and Spanish law, and counted on the participation of Encarnación Roca Trías, Magistrate of the Spanish Constitutional Court, Théophile M Margellos, President of the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) Boards of Appeal, and Ángel Carrasco Perera, Professor of Private Law at the University of Castilla-La Mancha.

The second roundtable was chaired by Albert Ruda, co-coordinator of the Spanish Hub, Associate Professor at the University of Girona and member of the ELI Council at the time. This part of the event included presentations by Juan Luis Requejo, Legal Secretary at the CJEU and Professor of Constitutional Law, and by the Secretary General of the ELI, Dr Rosana Garciandía, who gave the audience an overview of the way ELI works on a daily basis. Dr Garciandía highlighted the importance of counting on an organisation with such an active membership as ELI, in order for the legal community to respond to all the challenges that had been mentioned during the event.

You can find the agenda of the event here.