The most effective international legal system in the world exists in Europe. It works much like a domestic system, where violations of are respected, and the autonomous influence of law and legal rulings extends into the political process itself. The European legal system was not always so effective at influencing state behaviour and compelling compliance. Indeed the European Community's original legal system was intentionally designed to have very limited monitoring and enforcement capabilities. The European Court of justice transformed the original system through bold and controversial legal decisions declaring the direct effect and supremacy of European law over national law. This book starts where traditional legal accounts leave off. Karen Alter explains why national courts took on a role enforcing European law against their governments, and why national governments accepted an institutional change that greatly compromised national sovereignty. She then shows how harnessing national courts to funnel private litigant challenges through to the ECJ and enforce European law supremacy contributed fundamentally to the emergence of an international rule of law in Europe, where national governments are held accountable to their European legal obligations, and where states actually avoid policies that might conflict with European law.
Karen J. Alter is Assistant Professor of Government, Northwestern University.
OXFORD STUDIES IN EUROPEAN LAW
Series Editors:
PAUL CRAIG, Professor of English Law at St John's College, Oxford, and GRAINNE DE BURCA Professor of European Union Law at the European
University Institute. Florence
The aim of this series is to publish important and original research on EU law. The focus is on scholarly monographs, with a particular emphasis on those which are interdisciplinary in nature. Edited collections of essays will also be included where they are appropriate. The series is wide in scope and aims to cover studies of particular areas of substantive and of institutional law, historical works, theoretical studies, analyses of current debates, as well as questions of perennial interest such as the relationship between national and EU law and the novel forms of governance emerging in and beyond Europe The fact that many of the works are interdisciplinary
will make the series of interest to all those concerned with the governance and operation of the EU.