Saturday, March 15, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
Traditional accounts of the French reception of European law from 1958-1975 give the idea that the ECJ bypassed national governments and high courts, surfing on lower courts, European Law Associations and academics to promote European law. However, these accounts fail to highlight the complex context in which this process evolved. In this same span of time, the reception of European law in France had indeed to deal with major structural handicaps stemming from the Eurosceptic new Gaullist Fifth Republic. These handicaps were becoming all the more acute when the ECJ in the famous cases of Van Gend en Loos in 1963 and Costa v. E.N.E.L. in 1964 introduced a constitutional practise in European law based on the core doctrinal pillars of direct effect and primacy as well as an expectancy that national courts contribute to the building of the European legal order through sending preliminary references to the ECJ. How could the French legal system accommodate this step by the ECJ in the French political atmosphere of the 1960s? To answer this question, the paper will argue that the French judicial acceptance of European law supremacy was the result of the struggle of two informal networks made up of powerful politicians and laywers and with competing goal: for one network, to facilitate the penetration of European law into French national law, and for the other network, to challenge this. Moreover I will demonstrate how the shifting nature of this struggle determined how France positioned itself to European law in this period.
