Europe and Its Jurists

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the making of what is considered the birth of European law, namely the landmark decisions by the European Court of Justice in the van Gend v. Loos and Costa v. ENEL cases, in which the Court laid the basis of its constitutional doctrine. Relying on archival sources, the paper highlights both the part played by European political institutions in the creation and judicial validation of the theory of a European legal order, that is, of its specificity vis-à-vis national and international legal orders, and the political challenges that underpinned its conceptualization at the end of the 1950s. This work suggests that these mythical decisions must be fully understood as the result of a mobilization strategy led by the legal services of European leaders to secure the advent of a future United States of Europe even as the very project of building a supranational Europe was seen as compromised by its promoters.