Research seminar: Early Jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and Drafting of the Founding Treaties

Syllabus

The course will proceed as follows:

There will be an initial meeting at the start of the course and final meeting in the first week of June. In between these two meetings, the students will work independently and submit their results in electronic form, for which three deadlines will be set.

At the initial meeting, the students will be introduced to the research objectives, materials, their structure, legal context and theoretical underpinnings of the course, and receive instructions on how to conduct legal research and write a memorandum, including a template of a memorandum.

Then, they will be assigned, in groups of two or three students, court files. Their task will be to analyze and summarize arguments of the plaintiff, the defendant, the submitting court, if any, intervening parties, if any, the Advocate General, and the Court, establish connections between these parts and evaluate significance of the case for the research objectives. During the course, the students will be supported by peer and individual mentorship. After submitting their memorandum, the students will receive an individual feedback and suggestions on how to improve their analysis. After the review and potential corrections of their memorandum, the students will be assigned another court files or additional materials.

While analyzing the materials, the students will be asked to focus on arguments of the parties to the proceeding that relate to construction of a new type of community of law, which resembles constitutional-law as opposed to international-law-based argumentation.

After the completion of the research seminar students will be able to:

- Better understand the complexity of legal proceeding and specificities of plaintiff’s pleading and defendant’s counter-argumentation,

- Obtain basic knowledge of variations of legal proceedings in front of the European Court of Justice (ECJ),

- Research concepts of European constitutional law through their identification in the case files of ECJ and related materials;

- Develop skills of synthesis, interpretation and evaluation with view of ECJ case law;

- Critically assess legal research of oneself and of others.

Annotation

The research seminar provides students with an opportunity to work with primary sources from the foundational period of European intergation. We will primarily focus on court files of the European Court of Justice from the period of 1952-1964. Additional materials may include internal documents of the European Community institutions and the foreign ministries of the Member States relating to the Schuman Plan, the Rome Treaties, the European

Defense Community, the European Political Community, and the Luxembourg Compromise. Students will be assigned the materials based on their language abilities and submit results of their analysis in the form of a memorandum written in English.