Your World of Legal Intelligence
 United Kingdom | +44 (0) 20 7284 8080

Karen Alter, THE EUROPEAN COURT'S POLITICAL POWER: SELECTED ESSAYS Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com ), 2009. xxviii + 332 pp. ISBN 9780199558353. £40.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 May 2011
Pages332-334
AuthorSionaidh Douglas-Scott
DOI10.3366/elr.2011.0049
Published date01 May 2011

“Law is not autonomous from Politics.” This assertion, made by Karen Alter, permeates her work, and this collection of essays. Alter considers and analyses the reasons for the transformation of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) from its initial status, in the early days of the (then) EEC as a “weak and fairly ineffective court”, to, as Alter puts it (and many would agree) “a constitutional court in all but name”. Alter, a political scientist working in US mainstream political science (self-described as “one of the first political scientists to study the ECJ”) proceeds by careful fieldwork and analysis of empirical studies (such as the litigation strategies of those using the ECJ) to analyse “how the ECJ over time managed to invent for itself a political role that was far beyond what its founders anticipated”. However, she acknowledges (in the Preface) that a crucial inspiration for her interest in the ECJ came from two lawyers – Federico Mancini, former judge and Advocate General at the ECJ, and Joseph Weiler, a leading European law scholar.

The European Court's Political Power is a compilation of fifteen years of articles and book chapters by Alter on the role of the ECJ – some co-authored with others. Most of these have been left unchanged for this publication. Only three of the chapters are newly written for this book – the Introduction, Conclusion and chapter 4. Thus, this collection spans a range of Alter's writings on the ECJ, in which she considers crucial questions such as the following: how did the ECJ succeed in introducing changes, through its decisions, that the member states often did not want; although the ECJ has often been influential, why was it sometimes sidelined (as in the role it played in the – now defunct – ECSC); although often expansionist, why has the ECJ sometimes eschewed opportunities to expand the law; and why has the ECJ only sometimes asserted itself against member state governments?

These questions, and others, are pursued in 13 chapters divided into four parts. Part I is a general introduction to studying the ECJ. Part II comprises more specific issues confronting the ECJ during the founding period of legal integration (taken to be 1952–1980). This part includes, as chapter 5, one of Alter's most well known publications – “The European Court's Political Power”, originally published in 1995 – in which she argues that competition between different levels and branches of national courts facilitated the penetration of the...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT