THE EUROPEAN COURT AND NATIONAL COURTS —DOCTRINE AND JURISPRUDENCE
The European Court and National Courts—Doctrine and Jurisprudence Legal Change in Its Social Context
Edited by
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, ALEC STONE SWEET and J. H. H. WEILER
OXFORD 1998
Hart Publishing Oxford UK Distributed in the United States by Northwestern University Press 625 Colfax, Evanston Illinois 60208–4210 USA Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Federation Press PO Box 45, Annandale NSW 203 Australia Distributed in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg by Intersentia, Churchillaan 108 B2900 Schoten, Antwerp Belgium © The Contributors severally, 1997 Hart Publishing is a specialist legal publisher based in Oxford, England. To order further copies of this book or to request a list of other publications please write to: Hart Publishing, 19 Whitehouse Road, Oxford, OX1 4PA Telephone: +44 (0)1865 434459 or Fax: (0)1865 794882 e-mail:
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Prologue – The European Courts of Justice J.H.H. Weiler, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Alec Stone Sweet This volume revisits a well know terrain: the relationship between the European Court and Member State Courts in the so-called constitutionalization of the Community legal order. Its contours have been clearly etched by the cartographers of the European Community legal system. The contributions to this volume come, however, to this landscape from a different shore, examine it through a different lens and ultimately, we hope, map it in a different way. The title of this Preface—The European Courts of Justice—may seem to contain a typological error. After all there is, surely, only one European Court of Justice? The premise and defining approach of the entire volume is that the construction of the Community legal order is a tale in which national Courts (as well as other national and transnational actors) have played as important a role as the European Court of Justice itself; that constitutionalization is above all a “conversation” with a uniquely interesting grammar and syntax; that this conversation has taken place over time at differing levels of intensity and outcome; that this on-going conversation occurs in a context broader than a narrow discourse of legal rules and, finally, that this relational and processoriented perspective has both doctrinal and extra-doctrinal manifestations. The volume contains the results of a research project involving political scientists and lawyers from Europe and the U