The reform of the European Constitution continues to dominate news headlines and has provoked a massive debate, unprecedented in the history of EU law. Against this backdrop Monica Claes' book offers a 'bottom up' view of how the Constitution might work, taking the viewpoint of the national courts as her starting point, and at the same time returning to fundamental principles in order to interrogate the myths of Community law. Adopting a broad, comparative approach, she analyses the basic doctrines of Community law from both national constitutional perspectives as well as the more usual Europe.
National Courts and EU Law examines both how and why national courts and judges are involved in the process of legal integration within the European Union. As well as reviewing conventional thinking, the book presents new legal and empirical insights into the issue of judicial behaviour in this process. The expert contributors provide a critical analysis of the key questions, examining the role of national courts in relation to the application of various EU legal instruments.
This two-volume book, published open access, brings together leading scholars of constitutional law from twenty-nine European countries to revisit the role of national constitutions at a time when decision-making has increasingly shifted to the European and transnational level. It offers important insights into three areas. First, it explores how constitutions reflect the transfer of powers from domestic to European and global institutions. Secondly, it revisits substantive constitutional values, such as the protection of constitutional rights, the rule of law, democratic participation and constitutional review, along with constitutional court judgments that tackle the protection of these rights and values in the transnational context, e.g. with regard to the Data Retention Directive, the European Arrest Warrant, the ESM Treaty, and EU and IMF austerity measures. The responsiveness of the ECJ regarding the above rights and values, along with the standard of protection, is also assessed. Thirdly, challenges in the context of global governance in relation to judicial review, democratic control and accountability are examined. On a broader level, the contributors were also invited to reflect on what has increasingly been described as the erosion or ‘twilight’ of constitutionalism, or a shift to a thin version of the rule of law, democracy and judicial review in the context of Europeanisation and globalisation processes. The national reports are complemented by a separately published comparative study, which identifies a number of broader trends and challenges that are shared across several Member States and warrant wider discussion. The research for this publication and the comparative study were carried out within the framework of the ERC-funded project ‘The Role and Future of National Constitutions in European and Global Governance’. The book is aimed at scholars, researchers, judges and legal advisors working on the interface between national constitutional law and EU and transnational law. The extradition cases are also of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of criminal law. Anneli Albi is Professor of European Law at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. Samo Bardutzky is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
This book presents the case law of Polish courts, namely the Supreme Court, administrative courts and the Constitutional Tribunal, in which the principles of EU law have been successfully applied. It discusses how Polish courts apply principles of consistent interpretation, primacy and direct effect of EU law in their daily adjudicating practice in order to ensure effet utile of EU law, resulting in effective protection of individuals' rights derived from the EU legal order. The book explores the legal nature of these principles and, in particular, the requirement that national rules that are found to be incompatible with legally binding and enforceable EU law should be disapplied by the domestic courts. It explains Polish courts’ reasoning concerning the inseparable relationship between the principle of primacy of EU law and the remedy of disapplication of national law. As the guidelines provided for the national courts by the Court of Justice of the European Union are often quite vague, the work will be important and useful for academics and practitioners from different European jurisdictions to observe the manner in which these principles of EU law are applied in jurisdictions other than their own.
This is the first comprehensive collection of court decisions dealing exclusively with the relationship between European Community law and the national laws of the Member States. It contains 90 decisions given between 1962 and 1993 by both the Community's Court of Justice (20 cases) and the courts of the 12 Member States (70 cases). The volume includes the recent decisions of national courts concerning the Maastricht Treaty. Key recurring topics of the decisions are the supremacy and direct effect of Community law, its impact on national sovereignty and constitutional rights, and the remedies available before national courts for its enforcement. All the texts are presented in English, having been translated wherever necessary. Each decision is preceded by a concise summary and key-word heading. The volume also includes a systematic introduction, digest of key-word headings, table of cases, and detailed index.
The European Court of Justice once stated that the European Community is governed by the rule of law inasmuch as member states, Community institutions and individuals are bound to the basic constitutional charter, the Treaty. The purpose of this book is to answer the question whether this statement is still valid for the European Union, and to analyse which features best define the rule of law at the European level. In order to define the principle of the rule of law at the European level, this book undertakes a comparative analysis of what the principle means in different legal systems. An analysis is also made of the implications for national legal orders, specifically for judges. The conclusion reached as a result of the research undertaken for this book is the co-existence of two visions of the rule of law within national legal orders: the traditional view of each legal order by itself, and the new vision of the principle as defined by the Court of Justice. This legal phenomenon involves what is defined as `the paradox of the two paradigms of law', which determines a share of concepts, tools and remedies amongst legal systems.
Cases such as the Maastricht ruling by the German Federal Constitutional Court or the 'Crotty; decision by the Irish Supreme Court have gone down in the history of European integration as outstanding examples of intervention by judicial actors in important political processes. In this book, Dr. Castillo Ortiz makes for the first time a comprehensive analysis of all such rulings by national higher courts on European Union treaties issued during their processes of ratification. Using an interdisciplinary Law and Politics approach and a sophisticated methodological strategy, the book describes the political dynamics underlying some of the most relevant judicial episodes in the process of European Integration during the last decades: litigation strategies by Europhile and Eurosceptic actors, relations between the judiciary and the other branches of government, and clashes of power between national courts and the European Court of Justice of the European Union. By offering empirical evidence and by relying on scientific rigor, the book seeks to provide both experts and the general public an accessible account of one of the most salient but least studied aspects of current European law and politics.
For the time being, the political project of basing the European Union on a document entitled 'Constitution' has failed. The second, revised and enlarged edition of this volume retains its title nonetheless. Building on a scholarly rather than black-letter law account, it shows European constitutional law as it looks following the Treaty of Lisbon, with the EU's foundational treaties mandating the exercise of public authority, establishing a hierarchy of norms and legitimising legal acts, providing for citizenship, and granting fundamental rights. In this way the treaties shape the relations between legal orders, between public interest regulation and market economy, and between law and politics. The contributions demonstrate in detail how a constitutional approach furthers understanding of the core issues of EU law, how it offers theoretical and doctrinal insights, and how it adds critical perspective. From Reviews of the First Edition: "...should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a holistic perspective of the academic debate on Europe's constitutional foundations...It is impossible to present the richness of thought contained in the 833 pages of the book in a short review." Common Market Law Review "an enduring scholarly work, which gives an English-speaking audience important, and overdue, access to the long-standing and forever-vigorous traditions of (European) constitutional law... unhesitatingly recommend[ed]." European Law Journal "...real scholarship in the profound sense of the word..." K Lenaerts, Professor of European Law, Leuven
