re:constitution
2022/ 2023

Teresa Violante

Mobility Phase: iCourts, Copenhagen | Court of Justice of the EU

Managing conflicts of authority between national constitutional courts and the European Court of Justice: a weak judicial review proposal

Teresa Violante is a Research Fellow and a Phd Candidate at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. She holds a graduate degree in law (University of Coimbra) and a European Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratization (University of Padova), and lectures on fundamental rights and constitutional law. In her Phd project, she investigates weak judicial review by European constitutional courts, understood as the mechanisms that these courts have developed to soften the authority of their rulings near the political branches. She publishes widely on matters of comparative constitutional law and European law. She is also the Director of the Institute for the Global Rule of Law of the European Public Law Organization.

Managing conflicts of authority between national constitutional courts and the European Court of Justice: a weak judicial review proposal

Not every domestic constitutional court agrees with the ECJ’s unchallenged version of primacy. To the contrary, the opposite is true: most of these institutions have expressly articulated reservations to absolute primacy based on concepts such as ‘constitutional identity’ and ‘counter-limits’. The project will analyze the constellation of problems surrounding the contestation of primacy of EU law, and the finality of ECJ’s rulings by European constitutional courts from functioning democracies. By focusing on conflicts of authority between these institutions, and specifically the concept of weak judicial review, the project aims at developing a framework for the reconstruction of the relationship between the ECJ and national constitutional courts to avoid destructive conflicts of authority and lines of frictions and cleavages between legal orders.