Never has sovereignty been as fashionable as since its explanatory and normative force first came into doubt and its knell was tolled in the European Union. With the shift in authority away from the state to new sub-state, supra-state, post-state and non-state entities, an important question is...

This paper is essentially a translation of a comment in German (Joerges 2000) on a series of articles in which Rainer Schmalz-Bruns (1998, 1999a, 1999b) developed a concept of legitimate governance beyond the constitutional state, which he called deliberative supra-nationalism and contrasted...

This paper examines the explicit linkage in the recent work of Habermas betweencosmopolitanism and the constitutionalization of international law. Whereas previous thinking on the constitutionalization of international law has tended either towards the utopianism of world government or the...

This essay is a renewed effort to overcome the schisms between lawyers and political scientists in their conceptualisations of the European integration project. The first effort was my contribution Das Recht im Prozeá der Europischen Integration to Markus Jachtenfuchs/Beate Kohler-Koch (eds.),...

Abstract: In the Federfarma case (2005), the Italian Consiglio di Stato refused to request the European Court of Justice to give a preliminary ruling, stating that the fulfilment of EC obligations would have implied the violation of a fundamental constitutional right. The Federfarma decision is...

Abstract: The paper looks into the slow and at times controversial process of ‘Europeanising’ the Italian legal system, in order to exemplify how adaptation to changes takes place within entire branches of the state administration. Three examples are selected, all within the domain of labour...

Abstract: The Lisbon Treaty marks the end, at least for the foreseeable future, of the project of a European Constitution. But does it also mean a rejection of the tradition of Western constitutionalism? The author addresses the question outlining, first, the main elements of the modern Western...