Litigating anti-discrimination cases in Germany: what role for collective actors?

This paper argues that the role of collective actors in Germany in litigating an-ti-discrimination cases and in influencing the interpretation of EU law in this domain via the mechanism of references for a preliminary ruling to the CJEU has been very limited and at best indirect. The reasons are that due to the resistance from (mainstream) legal academia and also to economic actors a rather restrictive legal framework was reluctantly set up in Germany in 2006, which implemented the EU anti-discrimination directives in a rather minimalist way.