Suchergebnisse

From its origins in the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, the Court of Justice of the European Union has developed into a legal leviathan, exercising a profound influence on the Union through its widely-studied case law. That case law has been lauded and criticised in equal measure. Some see it as bold and ingenious, while others consider it the product of a rogue court. Who were the individuals who made the early Court tick? What were the obstacles the Court had to overcome in order to achieve its current status? Why were the Member States slow to grasp the significance of the Court's work? What is the relationship between the Court and the General Court, created by the Council in 1988 to alleviate the pressure imposed on the Court itself by its growing case load? This paper addresses these questions in their temporal, political and geopolitical context.

The purpose of this article is to consider the effect of the draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe on the European Court of Justice (ECJ). At the time of writing, the future of the draft Constitution is somewhat uncertain. Having been finalised by the Convention on the Future of Europe in the summer of 2003 and submitted to the then President of the European Council, it formed the basis for discussion at an intergovernmental conference (IGC) which opened in October 2003. Hopes that the text might be finalised by the end of the year were dashed when a meeting of the IGC in Brussels in December 2003 ended prematurely amid disagreement over the weighting of votes in the Council. However, it seems likely that a treaty equipping the European Union with a Constitution based on the Convention's draft will in due course be adopted and that the provisions of the draft dealing with the ECJ will not be changed significantly. Even if either assumption proves misplaced, those provisions will remain of interest as reflecting one view of the position the ECJ might occupy in a constitutional order of the Union.