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Stone Sweet on the EUJ & Judicialization of EU Governance

By Lawrence Solum

Alec Stone Sweet (Yale Law School and Yale Political Science) has posted The European Court of Justice and the Judicialization of EU Governance (Living Reviews in EU Governance) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This Living Reviews article evaluates the most important strains of social science research on the impact of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on integration, EU-level policymaking, and national legal orders. Section 1 defines the concepts of judicialization and governance, and discusses how they are related. As the article demonstrates, the ?constitutionalization of the EU,? and its effect on EU governance, is one of the most complex and dramatic examples of judicialization in world history. Section 2 discusses the institutional determinants of judicial authority in the EU in light of delegation theory. The European Court, a Trustee of the Treaty system rather than a simple Agent of the Member States, operates in an unusually broad zone of discretion, a situation the Court has exploited in its efforts to enhance the effectiveness of EU law. Section 3 focuses on the extraordinary impact of the European Court of Justice, and of the legal system it manages, on the overall course of market and political integration. Section 4 provides an overview of the process through which the ECJ?s case law ? its jurisprudence ? influences the decision-making of non-judicial EU organs and officials. Section 5 considers the role of the ECJ and the national courts in monitoring and enforcing Member State compliance with EU law, a task that has provoked a steady Europeanization of national law and policymaking.

Published on-line in the Living Reviews in EU Governance Series, Articles in the Living Reviews in EU Governance series provide critical surveys of the development of knowledge in specific fields of research. Living Reviews are peer-reviewed, up-dated on a regular basis, and fully digitalized.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 14, 2010 (boomark / email).