The Judicial Construction of Europe
Alec Stone Sweet
Abstract
The law and politics of European integration have been inseparable since the 1960s, when the European Court of Justice rendered a set of foundational decisions that gradually served to ‘constitutionalize’ the Treaty of Rome. In this book, the author, one of the world's foremost social scientists and legal scholars, blends deductive theory, quantitative analysis of aggregate data, and qualitative case studies to explain the dynamics of European integration and institutional change in the European Union (EU) since 1959. He shows that the activities of market actors, lobbyists, legislators, litig ... More
The law and politics of European integration have been inseparable since the 1960s, when the European Court of Justice rendered a set of foundational decisions that gradually served to ‘constitutionalize’ the Treaty of Rome. In this book, the author, one of the world's foremost social scientists and legal scholars, blends deductive theory, quantitative analysis of aggregate data, and qualitative case studies to explain the dynamics of European integration and institutional change in the European Union (EU) since 1959. He shows that the activities of market actors, lobbyists, legislators, litigators, and judges became connected to one another in various ways, giving the EU its fundamentally expansionary character. The first chapter, ‘The European Court and Integration’, provides an introduction to the book. The second, written with Thomas Brunell, assesses the impact of Europe's unique legal system on the evolution of supranational governance. The following three chapters trace the outcomes in three policy domains: free movement of goods (written with Margaret McCown), sex equality (written with Rachel Cichowski), and environmental protection (written with Markus Gehring). There is also a concluding chapter. The book integrates diverse themes, including: the testing of hypotheses derived from regional integration theory; the ‘judicialization’ of legislative processes; the path dependence of precedent and legal argumentation; the triumph of the ‘rights revolution’ in the EU; delegation, agency, and trusteeship; balancing as a technique of judicial rulemaking and governance; and why national administration and justice have been steadily ‘Europeanized’.
Keywords:
agency,
delegation,
dynamics,
environmental protection,
European Court of Justice,
European integration,
European legal system,
European legislation,
European policy,
European Union,
expansionism,
free movement of goods,
governance,
institutional change in the European Union,
judicialization,
law,
national administration,
national justice,
path dependence and precedent,
politics,
regional integration theory,
rights revolution,
rulemaking,
sex equality,
supranational governance,
supranationalism,
Treaty of Rome,
trusteeship
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2004 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199275533 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2005 |
DOI:10.1093/019927553X.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Alec Stone Sweet, author
Official Fellow, Chair of Comparative Government, Nuffield College, Oxford, and Senior Fellow, Schell Center for International Human Rights, Yale School of Law
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