Trade & Economic Law

What Governance Role Is the German Constitutional Court Playing?

English-language OJ readers are fortunate to have University of Connecticut's Peter Lindseth spending the semester in Berlin as the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy, where among other things he is posting to the Eutopia law blog on various governance issues in Europe.  (As I indicated in my earlier post, I plan to concentrate on international economic law, governance issues, and international and comparative law issues - including ones like this one, EU governance, in which as a non-specialist, I plan to act as facilitator, raising questions.)  In a recent Eutopia post, Lindseth pointed to an interview in Der Spiegel with Udo di Fabio, outgoing member of the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC).  The interview is fascinating, particularly as glossed in Lindseth's post:

As readers of [Eutopia blog] know well, the FCC has played, and will continue to play, a critical role in defining the constitutional parameters of Germany’s role in the ongoing struggle to resolve the Eurozone crisis. The Court’s jurisprudence will necessarily loom large as long as Germany serves as the Eurozone’s paymaster, and as long as the Court insists, as a matter of domestic constitutional law, on two conditions related to that function: first, that Germany’s financial participation in any bailouts must be determinate and not open-ended (i.e., no Eurobonds or other instruments amounting to joint and several liability); and second, that the national legislature must, consistent with historically grounded yet evolving conceptions of parliamentary democracy, be given an effective voice in approving the extent of Germany’s financial participation. The FCC views these two conditions as essential to preserving Germany’s democratic sovereignty in the face of the evident functional demands of the crisis, even as the Court otherwise permits, indeed even encourages, further European integration. In the current environment, these parameters will be critical because the resolution of the crisis will almost certainly demand some very costly sacrifices by the German taxpayer.

A second post from Lindseth, following the French credit downgrade, asks two key questions about German governance institutions:

European Governance: Professor Kenneth Armstrong on Framing Issues

(Professor Kenneth A. Armstrong is  professor of European Law at Queen Mary University, London; this comment was posted in response to KA's framing questions on European governance, and we are delighted to bring it up to the main page.  We welcome short or long comments on this topic; I'll choose to bring some to general attention in a separate post;...

Governance and the Eurozone: Framing Questions

Last fall, I posted about possible governance effects of eurozone crisis on the EZ and, more broadly, the EU.  I raised questions not as an expert on European institutions, law, or governance, but as someone with a long interest in governance and legitimacy questions for the international system.  They elicited some very interesting responses, particularly from University of Connecticut’s Peter...