Saturday, March 15, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
In the 1960s, an academic field of European Community law began to develop. As a part of this development, journals dedicated to European law emerged, and scholars, judges from the European Court of Justice and EC officials debated the nature of European law in the journals. One of the main questions was if European law should be characterised as international law or something resembling state/constitutional law. In my paper, I focus on one of those journals, namely the Common Market Law Review, which remains one of the highest ranked journals in European law studies. On the basis of a review of the issues from 1963-1993, the archive of the journal, and private archives of some of the authors, I will provide an analysis of the debate on the nature of European law in the legal academy focusing especially on the development of the constitutional understanding of European law, which obtained paradigmatic status in the early 1980s. Furthermore, I will provide the social history of the debate – who the authors were, what their interest in defining European law in a certain way was, and how they pursued their interests. The analysis thus provides an empirical basis for assessing the role of the legal academy in developing and legitimizing the European legal order – a role that has not yet been explored adequately, but is surely of great importance in the history of European law.
