In this Cover to Cover seminar, Morten Rasmussen and Bill Davies will discuss their new edited book together with chapter contributor Karin van Leeuwen.
This formative period of EU law witnessed an intense struggle over the emergence of a constitutional practice. While the supranational institutions, including the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament, as well as EU law academics helped to develop and promote the constitutional practice, member state governments and judiciaries were generally reluctant to embrace it. The struggle resulted in an uneasy stalemate in which the constitutional practice was allowed to influence the doctrines, shape and functioning of the European legal order that now underpins the EU, but a majority of member state governments rejected European constitutionalism as the legitimating principle of the new EU formed on the basis of the Treaty of Maastricht (1992). The struggle and eventual stalemate over the constitutional practice traced in this book accounts for the fragile and partial system of rule of law that exists in the EU today.
Bill Davies is Associate Professor at the Department of Justice, Law & Criminology, American University and a leading expert on the legal history of European integration. He is the author of Resisting the European Court of Justice (2012), editor of EU Law Stories (2017) and has also published on American legal history: Timothy B. Dyk: The Education of a Federal Judge (2022, with Timothy B. Dyk).
Morten Rasmussen is Associate Professor at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen and a leading expert on the legal histories of European integration and the League of Nations. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics and is co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of the League of Nations and International law (forthcoming 2026).
Karin van Leeuwen is Associate Professor in European political history at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) at Maastricht University, where she also is programme director of the European Studies Bachelor and co-initiated and co-leads the Law & History research network.
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