Principles of European Constitutional Law

While politics wrestles with the Constitutional Treaty, this volume presents a European constitutional law - not as a mere project but as binding law. There are good reasons to treat the European Union's current primary law as constitutional law: it establishes public power, legitimates legal acts, provides a citizenship, protects fundamental rights, and regulates the relationships among legal orders as well as between law and politics. Reconstructing primary law as constitutional law yields useful insights, as this volume seeks to demonstrate. This volume presents European constitutional law as it stands and, on that foundation, the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. The contributions present its theoretical and doctrinal fundamentals from the perspective of German-speaking scholarship, reflect the state of research, clarify methodological approaches, illuminate legal doctrines and assumptions, and identify research desiderata. The perspectives on offer are not uniform, but encompass varying methodologies and differing political approaches to integration.