The book will be entitled Community of Law and Community of Judges. The European Judiciary and the editors will be Dr. Alejandro Saiz Arnaiz and Dr. Joan Solanes Mullor.

The edited book will count with leading scholars of constitutional law, public international law and administrative law which have approached EU and conventional law in Spain. The twelve chapters that will be part of the book are authored by scholars who have been contributing to the academia and serving in institutional positions at the heart of the European integration process. The twelve authors have written down influential scholar contributions to the European scholarship and, also, they have served in high level institutional positions such as judges of the European Court of Human Rights, General Advocate of the Court of Justice of the European Union, or judges of the Spanish Constitutional Court. Their leadership in the Spanish academia is incontestable and the impact of their work both at the Spanish and European levels as well. For the first time, a collective endeavor reunites these Spanish leading scholars who want to reflect, collectively, on the diagnosis and future of the European judiciary. This is the added value of that collective book that, in English and for the European audience, brings together the reflection on the European judiciary from the point of view of the main Spanish scholars that have been contributing to the advance of the European integration process in the last decades.

The edited book pursues a complete assessment and rethinking of the European judiciary carried out by leading Spanish scholars. The twelve chapters are designed to address the role, function and reconceptualization of the three judicial levels of interaction of the European integration process: the EU, the conventional and national levels. The audience of the book is clearly the European scholarship, the authors have been largely contributing to the European integration debates over the years and this edited book will have a large impact in the European integration process literature. 

Part I will be devoted to the institutional dimension of the conventional system and the role of the European Court of Human Rights. Chapter I (authored by Prof. Alejandro Saiz Arnaiz) provides insights about the origin of the judicial conventional system and the connections between the design of the Strasbourg Court and the Court of Justice of the ECSC with the existing international jurisdictions at that time. Chapter II (authored by Rafael Bustos Gisbert) and III (authored by Luis López Guerra) reconceptualize the normative relationship between the Strasbourg’s Court and the national courts. This is a classical and unsettled topic which has been key in the last decades for understanding the European integration process. Both Chapters explore formal and informal forms of judicial interaction and particularly Chapter II explores how the idea of contrapunctual law, framed in the context of EU law, fits the conventional system. Finally, Chapter IV (authored by Paz Andrés Saéz de Santamaría) provides insights about two specific elements of the relationship between the conventional and the national levels which are currently at the forefront because of the Russia-Ukraine War: (i) the integration of other international instruments in the way of interpreting and applying European conventional law; and (ii) the use and reception of the interim measures in a context of armed conflicts.

Part II will address some of the most prominent institutional challenges for the Court of Justice of the European Union. Chapter V (authored by Javier Díez Hochleitner) and Chapter VI (authored by Daniel Sarmiento Ramírez-Escudero) will deal with the challenges of some of the most important concepts of EU law: autonomy and primacy. In particular, Chapter V explores how EU law is impinged upon the more and more interrelationship with other international jurisdictions. Chapter VI explores the rethinking of primacy of EU law in a context in which this principle has been under attack from the national level. Chapter VII (authored by Sara Iglesias Sánchez) will deal with the proposal to reform the Court of Justice and to transfer part of the preliminary reference proceedings to the General Court. Finally, Chapter VIII (Juan Ignacio Ugartemendía Eceizabarrena) will deal with the impact of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in a determinant tool for national systems, such as the technique of the interpretation in conformity of national constitutional rights in light of EU law (and the Charter). This is, again, a key institutional aspect which intensively links the national legal system with EU law.

Part III will discuss how constitutional courts are evolving and reacting in the aftermath of the European integration process. Chapter IX (authored by Xabier Arzoz Santisteban) explores how constitutional courts have been mobilized since late 60’s to be influential in the European integration process. Chapter X (authored by Pedro Cruz Villalón) will address the role of constitutional courts in a new understanding of a constitution, i.e. a constitution highly Europeanized which loses its unique nature of a purely national norm. Chapter XI (authored by Maribel González Pascual) brings to the debate, taking as an example one specific field such as criminal law, the role of constitutional courts as guardians of the national constitutional essences. Finally, Chapter XII (authored by Cristina Izquierdo Sans) concludes this Part assessing which are the limits, in the hands of constitutional courts, of EU law and, at the end, how they are operative in practice.