Acceso usuarios
Marc Jacob
The title could hardly be more portentous. The Past and Future of EU Law. All of it. In one volume. Luckily, neither the more down-to-earth subtitle � The Classics of EU Law Revisited on the 50th Anniversary of the Rome Treaty � nor the various contributions in this intriguing collection, edited by Miguel Poiares Maduro and Lo?c Azoulai, insist on the title's totalizing flight of fancy.
What we have here is an assortment of almost 50 short papers written by the great and good of EU law. They ponder select judgments of the ECJ, which are widely acknowledged to be titanic pronouncements that profoundly shaped the European legal landscape. Simply listing the names and affiliations of those involved in this project, let alone producing a synopsis of the substantive points raised, would have made this review resemble a telephone directory � both in terms of length and interest. I therefore content myself with the rider that it would be impossible to do justice to the subtleties developed in the individual papers in the space available and will instead dive right into the format and gist of the collection as a whole.
The editors have selected a dozen �classic� judgments covering a certain set of legal propositions for consideration in separate chapters. Occasionally they are clustered in groups of two or three where it is common to mention several decisions in the same breath. Each of these chapters is lavished with the attention of four authors, roughly corresponding to a quartet of views, with one from �the inside� (i.e. a past or present judge or Advocate General of the ECJ), one well-established academic, a member of a newer generation of scholars and an �outsider� (usually a commentator from a related discipline or a lawyer not necessarily specializing in EU law). �
