The French Constitutional Council, a quasi-judicial body created at the dawn of the Fifth Republic, functioned in relative obscurity for almost two decades until its emergence in the 1980s as a pivotal actor in the French policymaking process. Alec Stone focuses on how this once docile institution, through its practice of constitutional review, has become a meaningfully autonomous actor in the French political system. After examining the formal prohibition against judicial review in France, Stone illustrates how politicians and the Council have collaborated over the course of the last decade,...

This is the first comparative study written by a social scientist on the topic of European constitutional courts and their role in protecting human rights and defending new democratic institutions. Focusing on France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the European Union, the author traces the enormous impact of these courts on both legislative and judicial processes and outcomes, and explains why this impact continues to expand.

Alec Stone Sweet is one of the world's foremost social scientists and legal scholars. In this book, he examines the evolution of the European Union since 1959. After developing and testing a theory of integration, he then assesses the impact of the European Court of Justice on the politics of trade, sex equality, and environmental protection in the EU.

The law and politics of European integration have been inseparable since the 1960s, when the European Court of Justice rendered a set of foundational decisions that gradually served to 'constitutionalize' the Treaty of Rome. In this book, Alec Stone Sweet, one of the world's foremost social scientists and legal scholars, blends deductive theory, quantitative analysis of aggregate data, and qualitative case studies to explain the dynamics of European integration and institutional change in the EU since 1959.

The development of international arbitration as an autonomous legal order is one of the most remarkable stories of institution building at the global level over the past century. Today, transnational firms and states settle their most important commercial and investment disputes not in courts, but in arbitral centres, a tightly networked set of organizations that compete with one another for docket, resources, and influence.
In this book, Alec Stone Sweet and Florian Grisel show that international arbitration has undergone a self-sustaining process of institutional evolution that has...

The development of international arbitration as an autonomous legal order is one of the most remarkable stories of institution building at the global level over the past century. Today, transnational firms and states settle their most important commercial and investment disputes not in courts, but in arbitral centres, a tightly networked set of organizations that compete with one another for docket, resources, and influence.
In this book, Alec Stone Sweet and Florian Grisel show that international arbitration has undergone a self-sustaining process of institutional evolution that has...

An introduction to Immanuel Kant's constitutional theory, and to the European system of rights protection, this book explains how European Court of Human Rights has become the most active and important rights-protecting court in the world through its manifestation as a Kantian cosmopolitan legal order.