The Federal Language and the European Integration Process: The European Communities viewed from the US

This paper aims to offer an analysis of the language and conceptual toolbox employed by comparative lawyers in the US during the first years of the European integration process, paying particular attention to important intellectual figures, namely Peter Hay and Eric Stein. Between the 1950s and 1980s, a substantial debate concerning the “strategies” of legal/political integration, used by European political actors, arose in several comparative legal reviews and journals. During those years many authors from both sides of the Atlantic compared their perspectives, considering the comparability between American and European integration. Still today we employ the federal language used by these first commentators (pre-emption, incorporation, supremacy clause) when describing key concepts of European Community (today European Union) law. This article looks at the origin of such linguistic inheritance.