Implementing Transition: How Would it Work?

The United Kingdom Government has indicated that it wishes to have a 'transitional' or 'implementation' period as part of the process of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. This paper examines how such transitional arrangements might be adopted in terms of both EU law and UK law, and identifies a number of potential legal difficulties that would have to be addressed if a transitional period were to be put in place. The paper concludes that the most straightforward legal vehicle for a transitional period (in the sense of deferring exit from the EU so as to provide more time for agreeing the future relationship between the EU and the UK) would be extension of the Article 50 negotiation period, albeit that adopting such a course would be fraught with political difficulty.

Keywords: constitutional law, UK law, EU law, Brexit, European Union law

JEL Classification: K00, K1, K10, K19, K3, K30, K39, K4, K40, K49

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Armstrong, Kenneth and Bell, John S. and Daly, Paul and Elliott, Mark C., Implementing Transition: How Would it Work? (October 13, 2017). University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 57/2017, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3052328 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3052328