It might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that the chasm between Europe and her citizens is partially caused by the weakening of constituent power at the national level. Nonetheless, this article contends that the strength of ever closer union depends partly on the resilience of national constituent power. An insight recovered from French constitutional theory – that respect for constituent power is closely related to respect for limits on the power of amendment – is used as a measure of this resilience. Upon examination of judicial decisions in Germany and Spain in which enumerated substantive limits on the power of amendment have not been satisfactorily enforced, and others in Ireland and France in which the existence of essential limits on the power of amendment has been flatly denied, this article concludes that by debilitating national constituent power, ironically treaty ratifications conduce to ever closer remoteness between the peoples of Europe.

Response of national highest courts to the ECJ's integrationist agenda – Logic behind qualified acceptance of EU law supremacy and direct effect – Several possible explanations for the observed inter-court variation: the courts’ type and organisation; their power to review legislative acts under domestic law; the rules governing access to the judicial forum; the monistic tradition of the legal system and the level of public support for European integration – Assessment of empirical validity of these hypotheses using a new dataset coding the doctrinal positions and institutional constraints of 34 domestic highest courts – Most correlations small – Only one variable – the power to review statutory legislation under national law – appears to have a significant influence on the courts’ doctrinal response to legal integration – Some support for the argument that the varying institutional constraints and incentives under which highest court judges operate shape the way they accommodate and reconcile two conflicting goals

‘The Law of Laws’ – Overcoming Pluralism

Editorials in this journal are meant not to comment on acts or events, even if these take the form of judicial rulings or legislative acts. They are meant to point at the events' potential for constitutional scholarship; to indicate and propose new lines of research. The Kadi judgments of the Court of Justice's two instances, discussed in this issue by Stefan Griller, offer such an occasion. They point at the problem of relationships between legal orders. Can these best be understood under the now familiar palliative terms of ‘dialogue’ and ‘accommodation’? There is both reason and reward in looking for a keener articulation of the relationships. That is the contention of this editorial.

What is constitutional pluralism? What does it stand for? What does it expect to achieve, or change in European integration, or otherwise contribute to it? Is it a viable, desirable or perhaps even an indispensable theoretical take on European integration? These were the leading questions discussed in the Symposium ‘Four Visions of Constitutional Pluralism’ at the European University Institute in January of this year. Within the framework of the Legal Theory working group and under the auspices of the Academy of European Law the organisers, Matej Avbelj and Jan Komarek, hosted four key scholars from the field of EU legal and constitutional theory. Julio Baquero Cruz, Mattias Kumm, Miguel Poiares Maduro, and Neil Walker engaged in a groundbreaking three-hour discussion of their respective theoretical visions of European integration. This short note can provide just a taste of an extremely rich debate; however, its full transcript should soon be published by the EUI Department of Law as its working paper.