Bringing together a variety of outlooks from comparative law, legal theory, organizational sociology, socio-legal studies or political science, this Joint Working Papers explores the cognitive equipement through which international judges perform their role. The notion of 'fabric', borrowed from...

The increasing use in the EU of soft law norms has created an extensive debate over the centrality of law as the principle instrument of European integration. Under a certain understanding of legality - one that sees the function of law as the provision of stable normative expectations - the...

The provisions of the EC Treaty which deal with Member State tax measures clearly seem to indicate that, in the absence of provisions of secondary law harmonizing such measures, Community law provides simply for a rule against discrimination. However, in the application of the fundamental...

The European Union is commonly described as a temple-like construction resting upon three pillars. Whereas the first pillar, Community law, constitutes a "new legal order" of supranational character, the second and third pillar are considered to be of intergovernmental kind, i.e. traditional...

This article tracks the genesis of one of the EU's most established meta-narratives, that of Europeanization-through-case-law. Instead of studying this theory of European integration as an explanatory frame, I consider it here as the phenomenon to be explained and accounted for. Thereby, the...

The Maastricht-Urteil of the German Constitutional Court of October 1993 has left a deep mark on European Union law. Although some may consider it as part of legal history, the decision has never been overruled, and the ideas behind it are very much alive. This paper tries to examine the legacy...