National Remedies Before the Court of Justice: Issues of Harmonisation and Differentiation (Modern Studies in European Law)

The Court of Justice has delivered an extensive body of case law concerning the obligation of domestic courts to provide effective judicial protection to claimants relying upon Community law rights — including such landmark judgments as Factortame and Francovich. This book offers a critical analysis of the Court’s fast-changing approach to UK procedural autonomy and explores the difficult conceptual framework underpinning the case law. The author demonstrates how Community intervention in the domestic systems of judicial protection cannot remain unaffected by wider debates about the evolving European integration project, in particular, the tension between uniformity and differentiation as competing values influencing the exercise of Community regulatory competence. Because of its emphasis on an ideal of uniformity which has become increasingly untenable within the contemporary Community legal order, much of the existing academic discourse about national remedies and procedural rules now seems ripe for reconsideration. It is argued that the Court’s jurisprudence on the decentralized enforcement of Treaty norms needs to be freshly interpreted, having regard to the recent growth of regulatory differentiation within the Community system. The book provides a challenging account of this crucial field of EU legal studies. It includes detailed discussion of issues such as Member State liability in damages, Community control over national limitation periods, and the principles governing state aid and competition law enforcement.