"These papers were first presented at the annual Round Table Conference of the International Association of Constitutional Law, held at the University of Turku, Finland from 23rd-24th May 1997"--Acknowledgements.

Over the past few years, 'national constitutional identity' has become the new buzzword in European constitutionalism. Much has been written about the concept involving the Member States' national constitutional identities: it has been welcomed for (finally) accommodating constitutional particularities in EU law, demonized for potentially disintegrating the EU, and wielded as a 'sword' by certain constitutional courts. Scholars, judges, and advocates in general have rendered the concept currently so fashionable and, yet, so ambivalent, that an in-depth analysis is warranted to put some order into the intense debate over constitutional identity. This collection brings together a series of contributions in order to shed some light into the dark corners of constitutional identity. To this end, a threefold approach has been followed: a conceptual or philosophical approach, an approach based on EU law, and an analysis of the case-law of several European courts. First, the book explores what constitutional identity means and who decides on it. Further, the contributions analyze (and at times unveil) the areas that might collide or at least interact with constitutional identity. Among other issues, the book touches upon EU law primacy , Article 53 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, EU criminal law and the essential functions of the State, and the existence of an EU 'constitutional core' enjoyable and enforceable through EU citizenship. Finally, the book deals with the case-law of European courts on national constitutional identity, including the perspective of various national constitutional courts, such as those of Eastern and Central European Member States, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the much-less analyzed European Court of Human Rights. (Series: Law and Cosmopolitan Values - Vol. 4)

Do individual constitutions, and the legal cultures underlying them, pose an obstacle to future EU integration? This ambitious collection brings together reports from all the European Member States, systematically setting out their individual constitutional guarantees. In doing so, it tracks possible roadblocks to the future evolution of European integration. Written by recognised authorities in each Member State, it offers an authoritative and rigorous overview of the European Union's constitutional landscape. Its single-structure approach allows for comparison while maintaining consistency. It will become the standard reference work for academics, students and practitioners in the field of European Union law and integration.

Constitutional law in the United States and around the world now operates within an increasingly transnational legal environment of international treaties, customary international law, supranational infrastructures of human rights and trade law, and growing comparative judicial awareness. This new environment is reflected in increasing cross-national references in constitutional court decisions around the world. The constellation of legal orders in which established constitutional regimes operate has changed - there are more bodies generating law, more international legal sources, and more multi-national interactions that bring into view various legal orders. How do these transnational phenomena affect our understanding of the role of constitutions and of courts in deciding constitutional cases? Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era explores this question, looking at constitutional court decisions from around the world, and identifying postures of resistance, convergence or engagement with international and foreign law. For the United States, the book argues for cautious engagement by the Supreme Court with transnational sources of law in interpreting the national constitution. Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era offers law school students and professors an authoritative study of comparative constitutional law by one of the most important scholars of domestic and comparative constitutional law. The book defines how international comparative experiences are relevant to constitutional analysis and discusses in detail the multiple possible connections between international law and constitutional law including a comparative overview of constitutional law in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This two-volume book, published open access, brings together leading scholars of constitutional law from twenty-nine European countries to revisit the role of national constitutions at a time when decision-making has increasingly shifted to the European and transnational level. It offers important insights into three areas. First, it explores how constitutions reflect the transfer of powers from domestic to European and global institutions. Secondly, it revisits substantive constitutional values, such as the protection of constitutional rights, the rule of law, democratic participation and constitutional review, along with constitutional court judgments that tackle the protection of these rights and values in the transnational context, e.g. with regard to the Data Retention Directive, the European Arrest Warrant, the ESM Treaty, and EU and IMF austerity measures. The responsiveness of the ECJ regarding the above rights and values, along with the standard of protection, is also assessed. Thirdly, challenges in the context of global governance in relation to judicial review, democratic control and accountability are examined. On a broader level, the contributors were also invited to reflect on what has increasingly been described as the erosion or ‘twilight’ of constitutionalism, or a shift to a thin version of the rule of law, democracy and judicial review in the context of Europeanisation and globalisation processes. The national reports are complemented by a separately published comparative study, which identifies a number of broader trends and challenges that are shared across several Member States and warrant wider discussion. The research for this publication and the comparative study were carried out within the framework of the ERC-funded project ‘The Role and Future of National Constitutions in European and Global Governance’. The book is aimed at scholars, researchers, judges and legal advisors working on the interface between national constitutional law and EU and transnational law. The extradition cases are also of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of criminal law. Anneli Albi is Professor of European Law at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. Samo Bardutzky is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

In his 1996 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton announced that the "age of big government is over." Some Republicans accused him of cynically appropriating their themes, while many Democrats thought he was betraying the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. Mark Tushnet argues that Clinton was stating an observed fact: the emergence of a new constitutional order in which the aspiration to achieve justice directly through law has been substantially chastened. Tushnet argues that the constitutional arrangements that prevailed in the United States from the 1930s to the 1990s have ended. We are now in a new constitutional order--one characterized by divided government, ideologically organized parties, and subdued constitutional ambition. Contrary to arguments that describe a threatened return to a pre-New Deal constitutional order, however, this book presents evidence that our current regime's animating principle is not the old belief that government cannot solve any problems but rather that government cannot solve any more problems. Tushnet examines the institutional arrangements that support the new constitutional order as well as Supreme Court decisions that reflect it. He also considers recent developments in constitutional scholarship, focusing on the idea of minimalism as appropriate to a regime with chastened ambitions. Tushnet discusses what we know so far about the impact of globalization on domestic constitutional law, particularly in the areas of international human rights and federalism. He concludes with predictions about the type of regulation we can expect from the new order. This is a major new analysis of the constitutional arrangements in the United States. Though it will not be received without controversy, it offers real explanatory and predictive power and provides important insights to both legal theorists and political scientists.

The reform of the European Constitution continues to dominate news headlines and has provoked a massive debate, unprecedented in the history of EU law. Against this backdrop Monica Claes' book offers a "bottom up" view of how the Constitution might work, taking the viewpoint of the national courts as her starting point, and at the same time returning to fundamental principles in order to interrogate the myths of Community law. Adopting a broad, comparative approach, she analyses the basic doctrines of Community law from both national constitutional perspectives as well as the more usual European perspective. It is only by combining the perspectives of the EU and national constitutions, she argues, that a complete picture can be obtained, and a solid theoretical base (constitutional pluralism) developed. Her comparative analysis encompasses the law in France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom and in the course of her inquiry discusses a wide variety of prominent problems. The book is structured around three main themes, coinciding with three periods in the development of the judicial dialogue between the ECJ and the national courts. The first focuses on the ordinary non-constitutional national courts and how they have successfully adapted to the mandates developed by the ECJ in Simmenthal and Francovich. The second examines the constitutional and other review courts and discusses the gradual transformation of the ECJ into a constitutional court, and its relationship to the national constitutional courts. The contrast is marked; these courts are not specifically empowered by the case law of the ECJ and have reacted quite differently to the message from Luxembourg, leaving them apparently on collision course with the ECJ in the areas of judicial Kompetenz Kompetenz and fundamental rights. The third theme reprises the first two and places them in the context of the current debate on the Constitution for Europe and the Convention, taking the perspective of the national courts as the starting point for a wide-ranging examination of EU's constitutional fundamentals. In so doing it argues that the new Constitution must accommodate the national perspective if it is to prove effective.