On Thursday morning February 2nd, 1653, New York came into being as a city. From a dependent trading outpost run by the Dutch West Indies Company, it turned itself into a self-governing political community. Seven local magistrates went into the fort, swore an oath of service to the Dutch States General and said a prayer. Then they signed a municipal charter and conducted their first piece of business, putting their signatures to a statement ‘herewith [to] inform everybody that they shall hold their regular meetings in the house hitherto called the City Tavern, henceforth the City Hall, on Monday mornings from 9 o'clock, to hear all questions of difference between litigants and decide them as best they can.’

The European Court of Justice and the United Nations blacklisting regime - Background, case-law and conflict in relation to that regime - The Kadi II case - wider constitutional dimensions of the ruling - theoretical aspects of the dispute from rule of law perspective - the future

United Kingdom perspective on the Fiscal Compact - December 2011 Brussels summit veto - European Union Act 2011 - Legal obstacles to accession to Fiscal Compact - Legal obstacles to incorporation into EU Treaties - Relevance of legal conditions and political motivations - Legal obstacles to implementation of balanced budget rule - Interpretation of Article 3(2) - Parliamentary Sovereignty - Challenges to United Kingdom's political constitution

The ultra vires judgment of the Czech Constitutional Court in Holubec and its significance - Evolution and unfolding of Czechoslovak pension saga - Landtová judgment of the Court - Later developments and approaches of the various actors - Holubec as a revolt that did not take place - Broader structural implications for the preliminary ruling procedure and its reform - The functions of the preliminary rulings procedure - Atomisation of national judicial hierarchies and its consequences - Voice and representation before the Court - The role of governmental agent in proceedings before the Court - Law-making without representation - The position of constitutional courts in the European judicial system - When judicial cooperation turns uncooperative - Conceptualizing judicial non-cooperation and disobedience.

Human rights protection - Proportionality - Deference - Procedural rationality - Process-review - Interplay national courts and Strasbourg court

EU member state status - Member statehood - The idea of an “Integrated State” - Impact of EU membership on the concepts and substance of national constitutional law - Europeanization of member state's constitutional law - European constitutional law understood as Europeanized national constitutional law - European functions of constitutional organs - How to protect fundamental rights in a European area characterized by the overlaying of legal sources - The concept of “higher law” within the national legal order - A Union of Constitutionally Integrated States

On 16 October 2013 the United Kingdom Supreme Court delivered judgment in two conjoined cases that considered the legality of prisoner disenfranchisement. The Court considered both the compatibility of the disenfranchising provisions with the European Convention on Human Rights (‘the Convention’), and whether those provisions breached a right to vote acquired by the appellants under European Union law. In a unanimous judgment the Supreme Court dismissed the appeals, acknowledging the incompatibility of the relevant legislation with Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 of the Convention but declining to issue a declaration of incompatibility. The Supreme Court further held that EU law does not confer upon EU Citizens a substantive right to vote in European Parliamentary elections.

The cases are significant on a number of levels. First, the nuanced arguments advanced before the Court tested the jurisdictional scope of EU law and its capacity to confer rights upon EU Citizens in the absence of cross-border movement. The claims thus held the potential to widen the jurisdiction of EU law along the trajectory outlined by such ECJ case-law as Ruiz Zambrano and Fransson. Secondly, those arguments probed the extent to which the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (‘the Charter’) imports Strasbourg jurisprudence into EU law and thus creates an alternative mechanism through which to enforce Convention rights. Finally, the decision evidences the constitutional tensions that emanate from discordant interpretations of fundamental rights by national and supranational courts from discordant interpretations of fundamental rights by national and supranational courts.

The year 2013 will be remembered as a very good year for the evolution of the judicial conversation between the Court of Justice and the constitutional courts of the member states. This is true at least with regard to the particular form of judicial cooperation that may be considered the institutional channel of dialogue between the Luxembourg Court and national judges: the preliminary ruling mechanism. In 2013 the French Conseil Constitutionnel for the first time in its history sent a request for a preliminary ruling to the ECJ and the latter answered the first preliminary ruling sought in 2011 by the Spanish Tribunal Constitucional. Moreover, the Italian Corte Costituzionale decided for the first time to raise a preliminary reference to the Luxembourg judges in the context of incidenter proceedings. This represents a second step, following an initial one taken in 2008 in so called direct proceedings. The new judicial path of the Italian Constitutional Court (ICC) is in line with the new season of cooperative constitutionalism in Europe.

Not unlike national parliaments, which have seen their influence eroded as power gradually shifted to Brussels, constitutional courts are, if anything, net losers of the integration process.1 At least lower domestic courts had some incentives to embrace the constitutional revolution initiated by the Court of Justice. For them, the twin doctrines of supremacy and direct effect combined with the Simmenthal mandate came as a promise of empowerment. It was a promise of empowerment against domestic legislators as lower courts gained the power to set aside statutes, in legal systems that had either made it the exclusive preserve of constitutional courts or denied it altogether to the judicial branch. But equally, it was a promise of empowerment against the higher echelons of the domestic judicial hierarchy as EU law and the European Court afforded lower court judges a convenient avenue to challenge established lines of case law. None of this applied to constitutional courts. Not only did legal integration entail the loss of a cherished monopoly that was a distinctive trait of the Kelsenian model of constitutional review. But it also meant that, as the body of EU law expanded, so too did the Court of Justice's remit and influence. Very much like in a zero-sum game, any jurisdictional gain for the Court of Justice came at a commensurate loss for constitutional judges. Worse still, for the constitutional courts that used to exert a tight grip on the operations of ordinary courts, or wished to establish such control, the ever-expanding reach of EU law together with the emergence of a powerful European Court posed a potentially ominous challenge to their authority over ordinary judges.

Ever since the days of Van Gend en Loos and Costa, national attitudes to the unilaterally proclaimed supremacy of EU law have invariably captured a great deal of academic and political attention. Since the mid-1990s most national constitutional courts have converged to the interpretative orthodoxy of a qualified acceptance of primacy, couched in a pluralist vision of the relationship between the EU and its Member States. As things stand at the moment, and especially against the backdrop of Declaration 17 of the Lisbon Treaty, primacy is expected to be the constitutionally recognised conflict resolution norm that national courts shall turn to in almost all circumstances.

The Greek Council of State in its Judgment 3470/2011 does not break this pattern, even in the face of a politically sensitive issue. When considering whether an irrebuttable presumption of incompatibility between tenderers for public works contracts and owners or main shareholders of media corporations is permissible under EU law, the Greek court unequivocally accepts the relevant ECJ preliminary ruling in Michaniki and recalibrates its interpretation of the national constitution accordingly. In doing so, however, the Council of State reads an obligation for consistent interpretation into the constitution itself, thus turning the doctrine of indirect effect into a pragmatic tool for constitutional pluralism in action.