Cases and Materials on European Community Law

Cases and Materials on European Community Law

Description

A study of European Community law, always of interest since its creation, has taken on special importance in recent years. As the Community achieves its goal of an internal market and debates the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, which would add new dimensions to its programs and policies, American lawyers and law students naturally seek to learn more about the Community. This casebook is intended to provide a basic understanding of the Community, its structure, goals, fields of action, achievements and aspirations, as well as to lay a foundation for further research, analysis and legal writing. There are many valid reasons to study Community law. We present here three of the most important ones. The most pragmatic reason is that the Community has become the largest trading partner of the US, constitutes the largest single market in the world, and represents a major site of investment for US firms. US lawyers, both international house counsel and outside counsel, can no longer afford to possess only a limited knowledge of Community structure, law-making processes, and substantive law. Community competition and trade law have long been staples of international practice. Today, the European Community’s harmonization of health, safety and technical standards, banking, securities and company law, environmental and consumer protection measures, and action in the fields of agricultural and social policy represent matters of practical concern to US lawyers. The Community’s efforts to move towards an economic and monetary union are also of great importance to the international business and legal world. Second, Community law is a rewarding field for comparative law study. This has long been true in competition and trade law, where academics and practitioners have found provocative points of comparison and contrast. Today a rich source of comparative study is to be found in the Community programs for harmonization of laws. In some fields, as in competition, environmental and securities law, the Community has been significantly influenced by US models, but still strikes certain different notes. In other fields, such as banking, company law, consumer protections and social policy, the Community has taken quite a different path from that of US law. The divergences between US and Community law should provoke thoughtful reflection on the context and underlying values of each system. Third, Community law provides a laboratory for study of law formation: the development of an entire legal system in modern times. The study includes the Community’s constitutional framework, its institutions, substantive legislation and judicial law, and the constant interplay of policy and politics in an evolving federal system, one comprised of nations having many commonalities but also divergent legal systems, demographics and interests. The casebook reward the student who has come to the course for any or all of these reasons. The book covers virtually all major fields of Community law. (We regret that space considerations prevented inclusion of certain important topics, such as public procurement, transport and the Convention on Jurisdiction and Judgments.) The notes and questions have been crafted to facilitate reflection on how and why the Community institutions, and especially the Court, have reached their conclusions. The text and notes make numerous comparisons with US law. The authors hope that the reader will achieve not only a good comprehension of Community law but also a critical one. The casebook is intended for use in US law schools, but it may also be suitable for faculties in Europe and elsewhere. Our casebook follows traditional US teaching methods which give central attention to primary materials such as legislation and court judgments, inviting students to examine these materials critically through focused questions. Accordingly, Court of Justice judgments and Community legislation are subjected to the same kind of analytic review as US laws and Supreme Court opinions would be in a standard constitutional law casebook. We hope that European professors and students will find that the process of analytic examination of judgments and legislation through questions will assist in a more reflective comprehension of Community rules and judicial doctrines. The authors also wish to make a comment on the casebook treatment of the Maastricht Treaty of European Union (TEU). We have carefully integrated the modifications produced by the TEU into the relevant textual coverage in order to facilitate an appraisal of the Community in its proposed new form. We have, of course, identified the TEU modifications as conditional upon the Maastricht Treaty’s ratification. As of the present date, both the pace and the ultimate outcome of the ratifications process are somewhat in doubt. It is certainly possible that the Maastricht Treaty will be supplemented by additional protocols or interpretive declarations in order to facilitate its ratifications. Many observers believe that the ratifications process has demonstrated a failure of the Member States’ leaders to convey to their citizens the reasons for the proposed Maastricht provisions, and a failure to allay fears of excessive centralization and bureaucratization in the Community. The Documents Supplement, which accompanies the casebook, contains the EEC Treaty, the Single European Act, and the Maastricht Treaty. Because they constitute the foundation of the Community legal system, they should be read in tandem with the casebook. Editors’ notes in the Documents Supplement try to make the interplay between these texts as clear as possible. The Documents Supplement also contains a large sample of important secondary legislation, excerpted lightly and with care. Students will profit from working with these complex legislative texts. The accessibility of these important Community documents should also be helpful in research. Finally, some comments on class treatment of the text. The casebook’s comprehensive coverage provides instructors with a variety of options to satisfy different course objectives. For a basic survey course (two or three credits), we recommend that most of Parts I and II be covered, because they are critical to a fundamental understanding of the Community. Obviously, parts of chapters or entire chapters can be omitted, especially in a two-credit course. We also recommend that a basic survey include Chapter 18 on competition policy, Chapter 26 on external relations and at least one chapter from Part V, such as environmental protections and consumer rights or equal rights for women. There should be sufficient time in a basic survey course to permit coverage of further chapters in either competition policy or trade policy, but not both, because the textual treatment of each topic is lengthy and complex. It is possible to teach a variety of advanced courses making use of parts of the casebook. For example, a course could concentrate entirely on Community competition and trade law, Parts III and IV. In the alternative, one could construct a comparative competition law or trade law course, using the relevant part of the casebook together with materials on US or other nations’ antitrust or trade law. And advanced course might also center on the Community’s integrated internal market, including the chapters on harmonization of laws, services, establishment and capital from Part II and the social policy, environmental and consumer rights, and monetary union chapters from Part V. Finally, a course in comparative federalism might take selected portions of the casebook and add US, Canadian, German, Swiss or other materials. We hope that the casebook will prove easy to use and highly instructive, and that it will stimulate further scholarship centered on this rich field of study, the European Community.

Publication Date

1992

Edition

1

Cases and Materials on European Community Law

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