Suchergebnisse

Great Judgments of the European Court of Justice presents a new approach to understanding the landmark decisions of the European Court of Justice in the 1960s and 1970s. By comparing the Court's doctrines to the enforcement and escape mechanisms employed by more common forms of trade treaty, it demonstrates how the individual rights created by the doctrine of direct effect were connected to the practical challenges of trade politics among the European states and, in particular, to the suppression of unilateral safeguard mechanisms and inter-state retaliation. Drawing on the writings and speeches of French Judge and President of the Court, Robert Lecourt, it demonstrates that one of the Court's most influential judges shared this understanding of the logic of direct effect. This book offers a distinctive interpretation of the Court of Justice's early years, as well as of the purpose of the fundamental principles of European law.

Introduction -- Pork Products, 1961 : no unilateral safeguards -- Van Gend en Loos, 1963 : direct effect -- Costa v. ENEL, 1964 : supremacy -- Dairy Products, 1964 : no inter-state retaliation -- International Fruit, 1972 : no direct effect for the GATT -- Van Duyn, 1974 : direct effect of directives -- Simmenthal, 1978 : obligations of 'lower' national courts -- Sheep Meat, 1979 : no inter-state retaliation revisited -- Internationale Handelsgesellschaft, 1970 : protection of fundamental rights -- States and individuals in the great judgments of the European Court of Justice, 1961-1979.

This book suggests a new explanation of the European Union's legal system, emphasising its break with the inter-state retaliation mechanisms and how Europe's special form of legal integration is facilitated by intra-industry trade, parliamentary forms of national government, and European welfare states.

Robert Lecourt is recognised as one of the European Court of Justice's most influential judges between 1962 and 1976. Previous research has drawn connections between the legal doctrines established by the Court in the early 1960s and the contents of the doctoral dissertation on French property law that Lecourt completed in 1931. This paper examines Lecourt's contributions to Route des Jeunes, a monthly periodical aimed at French Christian Democrats between 1935 and 1939. It demonstrates Lecourt's involvement in a Christian Democratic milieu that criticised traditional concepts of sovereignty and supported the idea of a legally-binding international community. Lecourt's extensive experience in political organizing, partisan journalism, and propaganda for French Christian Democrats may also have informed Lecourt's approach to networking and publicity after his appointment as judge and later President of the European Court of Justice.

The widespreadunderstandingthat the ECJ'searly fundamental rights jurisprudence in Internationale Handelsgesellschaft (1970) and other cases was developed in response to judgments of theGerman and Italian Constitutional Courts has recently been questioned.Delledonne and Fabbriniclaimboth that the conventional account ischronologically inaccurate -the European Court's famous fundamental rights decisions came beforethose of the German and Italian courts -and that it relies on an understanding ofpostwarhuman rights leadershipby these national constitutional courts which a closer look at theiractual record does not support.This paper demonstrates however that there is substantially more evidence that the Court of Justice was responding to the concerns of the German and Italian constitutional courts than is frequently set out by either critics or supporters of the more conventional approach. The Court of Justice's famous fundamental rights decisions did indeed comeafterthis issue had been first highlightedin judgments ofthe German and Italianconstitutionalcourts; thethreat to the uniform application of European law posed by the fundamental rights aspect of thesejudgments wasprominently notedin the writings ofECJ judges;andthe caution shownby the German and Italian constitutional courtsin reviewing postwar domestic legislation on human rights groundsis not in conflict with an active rolein promoting the ECJ's new human rights jurisprudence. In short therefore,there isconsiderableevidence that the ECJ was motivated to create its new human rights jurisprudence by the possible threatto the uniform applicationof European law posed by theGerman and Italianconstitutional courts.

AbstractMoravcsik's The Choice for Europe puts forward a distinctive approach to explaining the 'grand bargains' by which the European states constructed European integration between the 1950s and 1990s. One notable exclusion from The Choice for Europe however is any detailed engagement with European legal integration, even though the creation of European law and the growing powers of the European Court of Justice must be among the most important European developments during these decades. Inspired by Moravcsik's scholarship, employing more common approaches to enforcement and escape in trade treaty systems as an explicit alternative outcome, and calling attention to the particular economic and social context of post‐war European trade, this article outlines a more 'liberal intergovernmentalist' approach to European legal integration during the first four decades of European integration, and proposes an agenda for future research.

Scholarship on the enforcement of international legal obligations often makes a fundamental division between "horizontal" (inter-state retaliation) and "vertical" (national court) enforcement mechanisms. This paper argues that such a division of treaty enforcement mechanisms fails to capture how "horizontal" and "vertical" enforcement relationships can be combined in one important scenario, where a state's acceptance of an obligation on their domestic courts to automatically enforce trade-based treaty obligations is matched by an abandonment by the state's trading partners of more common forms of retaliation-based enforcement mechanism. On the one hand, therefore, states allow their trade treaty obligations to be automatically enforced by domestic courts, while on the other, the beneficiaries of such a commitment in other states forego any rights to threaten trade sanctions to enforce treaty obligations. Such a "diagonal" enforcement mechanism is illustrated with examples drawn from the World Trade Organization, European Union, Andean Community, and NAFTA Side Agreements.