Emergence of EU Procedural Law

Research Project

Even though the decisions of the European Court of Justice are of tremendous importance nowadays, the procedural rules governing the Court have attracted little attention in EU legal research so far. One of the first questions that come to mind when dealing with EU procedural law is to which extent the ECJ procedural rules are comparable to the national procedural rules of each member state. Are they simply a replica of the procedural rules of one of the member states, did they draw upon the procedural rules of other international courts or has a completely new and peculiar set of rules been created?

These legal and, more particularly, comparative questions – which are already worth further investigation as such – will be looked at from a historical perspective. Using sources from the archives of the European institutions and the relevant ministries of the founding states, the emergence of the procedural rules of the European Court of Justice will be examined. How did the rules for this novel organization with its unique structure evolve, given that there was no single example of procedural rules that could be drawn upon, especially because of the supranational nature of the Court? How could the six founding states with their six different national procedural rules agree on the way in which future legal disputes of the community should be adjudicated? How did the decision making process for these procedural rules work, keeping in mind that that those procedural rules, apart from the founding treaties, were the first legal provisions that were adopted by the Community?

By trying to answer these questions, my project seeks to give insight into one of the first decision making processes of the early days of the Community.