European Union Law - Cases

The purpose of this casebook is to provide students of European integration and all those working with European Union Law in practice with a compact collection of the most important judgments in this area. The collection is equally suitable for beginners, who will focus on the `classics', such as van Gend en Loos and Costa v ENEL, and for advanced students in postgraduate programmes who will appreciate to find a good overview of EC competition law and even a number of cases on anti-dumping and external trade law. The advantage of the present collection over previously published casebooks is the relatively extensive coverage of the judgments. Rather than taking short bits and pieces from the decisions and putting them in different places of the `text, cases and materials' volume, the judgments are reproduced here with the most important passages in one piece. This gives a much better overview of the decisions and allows students and teachers to read in context and to set their own priorities. Since the opinions of the Advocates General at the Court are an invaluable resource for the better understanding of the issues and have often given important guidance to the Court, excepts of a selection of these are also included in this volume. The hope is, therefore, that the book will not only be read `from cover to cover' but will prove equally useful as a reference work for frequent consultation. One hundred `leading cases' have been edited and are presented in fifteen chapters to cover the most important areas of Community Law. Each case presentation begins with a short and concise summary of the facts. Subsequently, some `questions for consideration' provide guidance for the reading of the judgments. These are followed either by excepts from the Advocate General's opinion or directly by excerpts from the judgment itself. At the end of many of the leading cases, shorter passages from judgments on related issues help in understanding the development of the Court's case law over time. In the quoted passages, the paragraphs are numbered for ease of reference. This has been consistent practice of the Court since the early 1970s. Where an earlier judgment or an Advocate General's opinion did not have paragraph numbers in the original, they were added by the present author. This is indicated by an asterisk (*). Whenever editorial changes for better understanding have been made in the judgments and whenever passages have been omitted in the middle of the judgment, this is indicated by brackets [...]. Text in such brackets should be read as if part of the respective sentence. Since most of the opinions of Advocates General have been shortened, the footnote numbering may seem erratic. However, it corresponds to the original, except that many footnotes and thus numbers have been omitted for length. References to secondary legislation, i.e. to regulations or directives in the Official Journal, have usually been replaced by references to the volume: Frank Emmert (ed.), European Union Law -- Documents, Kluwer Law International 1999, which is recommended as a companion to the present volume.