Central European Constitutional Courts in the Face of EU Membership explores German legal influence on other systems of constitutional justice, concentrating on the impact of the Federal Constitutional Court’s approach to EU integration on constitutional courts in Hungary and Poland.

"The book contains a collection of articles on the European Union and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), the Eurosystem, monetary law, central bank independence and central bank statutes as well as on financial law. The authors are current or former members of the Legal Committee of the ESCB (LEGCO). This book commemorates ten years of work by the Working Group of Legal Experts of the European Monetary Institute and by the LEGCO. It is dedicated to Mr Paolo Zamboni Garavelli, former Head of the Legal Department at the Banca d'Italia and member of LEGCO, who died in 2004."--Editor.

Judicial institutions in the new democracies established after the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe have become patterned on a transnational template that maximises judicial empowerment to the detriment of national parliaments. Through the influence of an elite, transnational community of interest, revisions to the judiciary have been implemented with little attention from politicians or the public. As a result, there has been a shift in the role of the judiciary from adjudication under the law towards improvising public policy. Transnational Networks and Elite Self-Empowerment is an inquiry into why and how this could have come about, and what the implications are for democracy. Cristina Parau explores the processes by which the elites have used transnational networks as a means of self-empowerment, and how they have been able to entrench their minority influence within the constitutions of their countries. Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, she builds a strong case through a deep analysis set against and supported by an extensive series of interviews with key political actors. This is a timely reminder of the need to pay attention to our democratic institutions and not to take for granted the foundations on which they are laid.

The onset of the 2004 EU enlargement witnessed a number of predictions being made about the approaches, capacity and ability of Central European judges who were soon to join the Union. Optimistic voices, foreshadowing the deep transformative power that Europe was bound to exercise with respect to the judicial mentality and practice in the new Member States, were intertwined with gloomy pictures of post-Communist limited formalism and mechanical jurisprudence that could not be reformed, which were likely to undermine the very foundations of mutual trust and recognition the judicial system of the Union is built upon. Ten years later, this volume revisits these predictions and critically assesses the evolution of Central European judicial mentality, institutions and constitutionality under the influence of the EU membership. Comparatively evaluating the situation in a number of Central European Member States in their socio-legal contexts, notably Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania, the volume offers unique insights into the process of (non) Europeanisation of national legal systems and cultures.

This book shows that constitutional courts exercise direct and indirect power on political branches through decision-making. The first face of judicial power is characterized by courts directing political actors to implement judicial decisions in specific ways. The second face leads political actors to anticipate judicial review and draft policies accordingly. The judicial–political interaction originating from both faces is herein formally modeled. A cross-European comparison of pre-conditions of judicial power shows that the German Federal Constitutional Court is a well-suited representative case for a quantitative assessment of judicial power. Multinomial logistic regressions show that the court uses directives when evasion of decisions is costly while accounting for the government’s ability to implement decisions. Causal analyses of the second face of judicial power show that bills exposed to legal signals are drafted accounting for the court. These findings re-shape our understanding of judicialization and shed light on a silent form of judicialization.

This book discusses the tradition and the institutions of federalism in the Eastern, Central and Western European countries and deals with many innovative issues such as multi-level-governance, network government, devolution, subsidiarity, asymmetry and functionalism. An assumption of the book is that the European enlargement and the new European constitution could result in two major evolutions in the future: one is a full federal state, the other is an institutional response to the effects of the technological innovations of our epoch.