Paper Titles & Abstracts

The attention for the role of courts in European politics has to a large extent developed from the legal and political science literature on the 'legal revolution' - the 'constitutionalization' of European law by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) (Stein 1981, see Davies&Rasmussen 2012). After the first studies on the European Court of Justice, a literature appeared that broadened the scope to analysing the acceptance of this constitutional paradigm by national courts (i.e. Alter 2001, Stone Sweet 2004). While this literature presents important conclusions on the mechanisms behind this acceptance, it hardly problematizes the nature and scope of this acceptance, thus overlooking questions as to how (and how consistent) European law was accepted (Davies 2012, also Conant 2003). This paper aims to develop a more distinguished analysis of this acceptance, approaching courts as political actors that not only received but also contributed to legal developments. It will present a case study on the role of Dutch courts in the emergence of the constitutional paradigm in the early 1960s. Dutch courts at the time apparently played a crucial role in accepting the paradigm, both by referring most of the first preliminary references, among which the famous Van Gend en Loos case, and because of their favourable constitutional system (Claes&Witte 1998, Van Leeuwen 2012). This paper however will reconsider this narrative by looking at the actors behind these cases (such as networks of jurists: see Vauchez 2010), and at their historical context, for example at the cases that were not referred.