In the classical narratives of the story called European integration, national judges are said to have a ‘mandate’ under European law: they are ‘empowered’ by EC law or, in the less thrilling versions of the story, they simply become ‘Community judges’. Not only are national judges obliged to apply substantive EC law, they are also requested to apply it in the way required by the Court of Justice. How, precisely, national judges are asked to apply EC law in domestic courts has traditionally been portrayed through the case law of the Court of Justice; not much attention has been paid to the reality in national courts. Over the years, the case law of the Court of Justice has created an image of a veritable European judicial Hercules: a judge who reads in many of the official languages of the European Union; who knows not only all the relevant national and European law, which he or she applies ex officio, but also engages in comparative interpretation of the law; who identifies him- or herself with the European telos which he or she is applying on the national level; and so on.

Although the european Community Treaty does not contain a specific chapter or article dedicated to the audiovisual sector, European Community law has had a significant impact on the way in which Member States regulate their film and television industries. Given the commercial nature and international reach of many media goods and services this should not be surprising, but Community oversight has here been particularly controversial because of the importance ascribed to cultural and political considerations. This article examines how such considerations have been accommodated within the European Community legal system and the impact that Community law has had on domestic audiovisual policies in practice. It focuses on those measures introduced by states to support their domestic film and television industries and to ensure that domestic audiences have access to films and television programmes that are culturally relevant and meaningful.

States regulate products. They may make access to their market, or favourable rates of taxation, conditional on compliance by products with rules that aim to protect safety, health, morality, the environment and so on. When these rules concern the physical composition of the product, regulating, for example, the ingredients in foodstuffs or the chemicals used in toys, or the recyclability of batteries, Cassis de Dijon, and its legislative and jurisprudential spawn, tell the European lawyer how to approach the resulting barriers to trade.

This chapter considers two similar techniques for companies to give security to their creditors: the floating charge and the floating mortgage. These are widely used in England and Germany respectively. Central to both is the use of monetary claims obtained by companies against third parties in the course of their commercial activities. Such claims are variably known as ‘book debts’, ‘accounts receivable’ or ‘receivables’; here, these expressions will be used interchangeably. Before the legal incidents of these two types of security are set out and compared, the factual background of their operation is explained. The comparative analysis will then try to shed some light on questions that arise in connection with each form of security.

The above quotation from the Confederation of British Industry’s (CBI) response to the European Commission’s (hereinafter, ‘the Commission’) Green Paper on the reform of the EC Merger Regulation in 2002 still summarises quite aptly the criticism expressed in recent years by members of the business and legal community about what the critics perceive as a serious shortcoming in the current system of EC merger control: the lack of effective, meaningful in practical terms, judicial control over the administration’s decisions in this area.

Youssef nada is a 77-year-old man, who lives in the tiny commune of Campione in Switzerland. He is not allowed to leave this commune. Nor can he access his financial accounts, despite being a senior figure in the world of banking. The problem Mr Nada faces is that his bank, the Al Taqwa bank, is associated with the Moslem Brotherhood and that Mr Nada—an Egyptian by birth—is also connected with this organisation. Among his adversaries is the Egyptian Government of Hosni Mubarak, which desires to get him back to Cairo, where it is clear his safety could by no means be guaranteed. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Mr Nada also incurred the enmity of the US Government. He found himself placed on a UN sanctions black-list—hence the restrictions on his movement and financial dealings.

It is indeed a crucial moment now that Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have begun to join the EU. The Maastricht Treaty was itself, in several respects, a turning point in European construction; Member States then became aware of the increasing influence of EU law and started to defend their autonomy against the ‘attacks’ stemming from it. With the accession of the CEE states, the ‘Solange story: a story about national constitutional courts resisting a straightforward surrender of national legal sovereignties, and insisting on their own role as guardians of any further transfer of powers from the national to the European level’, can now enter into ‘its chapter 3’. National or constitutional identity is the main arm of resistance, and these national reactions require a rethinking of the relationship between national and European law.

This is a critical analysis—in the light of the Lisbon Treaty, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) case law—of the judgment in R v MAFF, ex p First City Trading, or at least of that part of the judgment concerning the domestic reach of general principles of law. Laws J held that the legal status of the general principles ‘made’ by the ECJ is inferior to that of the principles enshrined in the Treaty, and that therefore the domestic reach of the former is narrower than that of the latter. In the years since the judgment was delivered, however, it does not appear to have been considered by the ECJ and there seems to have been little academic evaluation of its cogency and implications. One commentator considered that the distinction drawn by the judge seemed correct. Another was critical, asserting that ‘the distinction between principles based on Treaty provisions and general principles of law cannot be deduced from the case law of the Court of Justice’. The possible entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, which recognises that the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (and thus presumably the rights, freedoms and principles within it) has ‘the same legal value as the Treaties’, makes it appropriate to revisit the judgment and consider whether Laws J’s approach was correct.

The internal market for services is one of the objectives set by the founding fathers of the EC back in 1957. It is only in the last 10 to 15 years, however, that this aspect of the internal market has seriously attracted the attention of the EC legislature and judiciary. With the exception of some sector-specific directives dating back to the late 1980s, it was only with the deregulation of network industries, the development of electronic communications and the spread of financial services in the 1990s that substantial pieces of legislation were adopted in the field of services. Similarly, the European Court of Justice (hereinafter, ‘the ECJ’ or ‘the Court’) left the principles established in Van Binsbergen back in 1973 to hibernate for a long time before fully applying them in Säger and constantly thereafter. Ever since, the Court’s case law in this field has become so important that it is now the compulsory starting point for any study concerning the (horizontal) regulation of the internal market in services. The limits inherent to negative integration and to the casuistic approach pursued by judicial decisions have prompted the need for a general legislative text to be adopted for services in the internal market. This text, however, hotly debated both at the political and legal levels, has ended up in little more than a complex restatement of the Court’s case law. It may be, however, that this ‘little more’ is not that little.

In the last 20 years, the application of EC competition law by the Commission has been increasingly informed by economics. However, whilst the Commission has operated an economically enlightened regime in the field of merger control as a whole, its policy on conglomerate mergers and ambiguity over the role of efficiencies have received adverse comment. Several defeats in the Court of First Instance suggested poor handling of economic evidence in the merger review process.

As a general principle of Community law elaborated by the European Court of Justice (hereinafter, ECJ or ‘the Court’), effectiveness ‘requires the effective protection of Community rights and, more generally, the effective enforcement of Community law in national courts’: its origins—it has been argued—‘lie in the interpretative techniques of the Court which, even at an early stage, favoured a liberalised construction of the Treaty provisions so as to ensure their effet utile’. In fact, the roots of the principle of effectiveness can be found in the seminal case of Van Gend en Loos, which, without expressly naming that principle, provided the conceptual tools that have moulded its construction throughout the Community case law.

The aim of this chapter is to analyse whether the EU order has the potential to exert a beneficial influence on the future development of international law. While the work strongly argues in favour of this aim, it is nevertheless sensitive to the difficulties in the relationship between these two legal orders and examines these issues in some detail. The article accordingly pursues its aim by exploring the history of that relationship, as one that has not always been easy, but, which, in the future, may prove fruitful.

This chapter discusses whether Article 81 EC has a unique consumer welfare goal. It argues that public policy goals must also be considered within Article 81 EC today.

Competition policy cannot be made rational until one decides what it is there to achieve and whether it is to have one goal, or many. Community competition law’s goals are rarely discussed, but many of the Commission’s policy statements now assert that the objective of Article 81 EC is to protect competition on the market as a means of enhancing consumer welfare and ensuring an efficient allocation of resources. There is no room in the Commission’s new world for public policy goals. Many Community competition lawyers support the Commission’s new approach.

After Each New Treaty amendment, it comes time to hand out the ‘Major Awards’ for the worst-drafted new Treaty provisions. For the Treaty of Lisbon, there is a clear winner: the provisions concerning the opt-outs of the UK, Ireland and Denmark from the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) policies. These already-complex provisions have been made further complex in order to address, on the one hand, the demands of these Member States for further flexibility as regards JHA policies, and on the other hand, to clarify the position if these Member States wish to opt out of further developments regarding rules into which they have already opted.

This chapter makes no attempt to present a definitive exposé of the relationship between Schengen free movement rights and the principle of ne bis in idem. Although elements of the basic structure of that relationship are relatively fixed, the questions that it raises are complex and sensitive. In the absence, thus far, of legislative action by the Council, it has fallen to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to define a number of core concepts in the contexts of references for preliminary rulings that have been made to it by national courts. In so doing, it has necessarily found itself choosing between two desirable goals that are partially irreconcilable with each other: liberalised free movement of persons within the ‘Schengen Area’, on the one hand, and the Union’s objective of ‘provid[ing] citizens a high level of safety within an area of freedom, security and justice’, on the other hand.

If you read certain newspapers you might be forgiven for thinking that human rights were an alien imposition foisted upon us by ‘the other’. It is a misconception that has regrettably taken root. A central theme of my lecture this evening is to explode this myth, and to demonstrate how far from being some ‘European’ imposition, Britain has been at the forefront of the political and legal development of human rights across Europe and across the world.