Anthony Arnull

European Union Law: A Tale of Microscopes and Telescopes

Among the many fields of legal study is a subject known as comparative law, which involves comparing different national legal systems. To help make this daunting exercise more manageable, comparative lawyers divide the world’s legal systems into families based on their distinctive features or style (Zweigert and Kotz, 1998: 67). Legal scholarship generally reflects the family to which its author belongs.

A Constitutional Court for Europe

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.

European Union Law: A Very Short Introduction

The Introduction outlines the questions that this VSI attempts to answer. Why does the EU arouse such strong passions? As an organization based on international treaties, why has it proved capable of having such far-reaching effects on its Member States and their citizens and on countries that lie beyond its borders? Part of the explanation lies in its law and legal system, which have proved remarkably effective in ensuring that Member States respect the commitments made when they signed those treaties. But what exactly is EU law about? And how has it become part of the legal DNA of its Member States so much more effectively than other treaty-based regimes?