This chapter discusses the Court’s 1961 judgment, Pork Products, where the Court insisted that the member states had no right to unilaterally adopt safeguard measures within the European Economic Community. Unlike many other trade treaties, the Treaty of Rome required that its member states request prior authorization from the European Commission before any safeguard or escape measures could be adopted. The Pork Products judgment, however, also revealed the inadequacy of the mechanisms explicitly provided for by the Treaty to ensure the effectiveness of this system. Making the Treaty of Rome’s prohibition on unilateral safeguard mechanisms effective would therefore require the direct effect of European law before national courts within the member states.

This chapter discusses the Court’s 1964 judgment, Dairy Products, where the Court declared that self-help mechanisms of reciprocity and retaliation, so important in many trade treaty systems, were comprehensively prohibited within the European legal order. This judgment is often rightly understood as marking an essential difference between European law and general international law. This chapter demonstrates that the principle announced in Dairy Products was also directly connected to the direct effect and supremacy doctrines of European law, again as shown by national court enforcement of treaty obligations in other treaty systems, and by the writings of judge Lecourt.

This chapter builds on the detailed discussions of particular ECJ judgments earlier in the book to put forward a new way of understanding the founding of the European legal order. It includes both the doctrines establishing rights for individual litigants before national courts and the doctrines specifying new and demanding relationships between the European states, and demonstrates how each is related to the other. It concludes with a discussion of judge Robert Lecourt’s role in the early decades of the European Court of Justice.

This chapter discusses the Court’s 1972 judgment, International Fruit, where the Court denied that provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) should be granted direct effect within the European legal order. This judgment is often understood as the first of many instances in which the Court denied the direct effect of GATT, and later World Trade Organization (WTO), obligations. This chapter uses the Court’s rejection of direct effect in International Fruit to offer an improved understanding of the Court’s declaration of direct effect in Van Gend en Loos, highlighting its connections to the prohibition of inter-state retaliation and unilateral safeguard mechanisms within the European legal order.

This chapter discusses the Court’s 1979 judgment, Sheep Meat, where the Court insisted on its longstanding prohibitions of both unilateral safeguards and inter-state retaliation during a difficult agricultural dispute between France and the United Kingdom. This chapter uses the Sheep Meat dispute to elaborate on the strengths and limitations of the system of direct effect as a solution to international collective action problems within the European legal order.

This chapter discusses the Court’s 1974 judgment, Van Duyn, where the Court declared that provisions of Directives could enjoy direct effect in the national legal order. This judgment is often recognized as the landmark judgment on the ‘direct effect of Directives’, and remains a controversial decision. This chapter demonstrates that the direct effect of Directives was a logical consequence of the Court’s use of direct effect as a substitute for inter-state retaliation, and shows that this understanding of the direct effect of Directives can be found in the early writings of judge Lecourt.

This chapter discusses the Court’s 1963 judgment, Van Gend en Loos, where the Court declared that European law could be relied upon by private individuals before their national courts. The direct effect of European law is often understood as empowering private individuals and national courts, as supplementing the European Commission-initiated compliance procedure set out in Article 169 of the Treaty of Rome, and increasing the binding nature of European law. This chapter demonstrates that the direct effect of European law was also directly connected to the Court’s rejection of the possibility of inter-state retaliation within the European Economic Community. This is demonstrated both by advocacy of direct effect for other trade-related treaty systems, where reformers often wish to suppress retaliatory enforcement mechanisms, and by the writings of judge Lecourt, which demonstrate that this important aspect of direct effect was well recognized by one of the Court’s then most influential judges.