The need to balance power between the Member States and the Union, and between public power and the market, has created powerful constitutional dilemmas for the European Union. This new book describes and analyzes the new Economic Constitution developed by the European Court of Justice. In doing so it discusses different constitutional models and forms of legitimacy and evaluates the limits to state and public intervention in the market, the division of competences between Member States and the EU, the principle of non-discrimination, and the notion of fundamental rights. This leads to a critical examination of the process of constitution-making in the EU, and the role of the Court of Justice in this process.

This book revisits, in a new light, some of the classic cases which constitute the foundations of the EU legal order and is timed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Rome Treaty establishing a European Economic Community. Its broader purpose, however, is to discuss the future of the EU legal order by examining, from a variety of different perspectives, the most important judgments of the ECJ which established the foundations of the EU legal order. The tone is neither necessarily celebratory nor critical, but relies on the viewpoint of the distinguished line-up of contributors - drawn from among former and current members of the Court (the view from within), scholars from other disciplines or lawyers from other legal orders (the view from outside), and two different generations of EU legal scholars (the classics revisit the classics and a view from the future). Each of these groups will provide a different perspective on the same set of selected judgments. In each short essay, questions such as 'what would have EU law been without this judgment of the Court? what factors might have influenced it?; did the judgment create expectations which were not fully fulfilled?' and so on, are posed and answered. The result is a profound, wide-ranging and fresh examination of the 'founding cases' of EU law.