Along came a spider...

The European and National Constitutional Law Project (EuNaCon) – set up by Monica Claes of the Tilburg Institute of Comparative and Transnational Law at Tilburg University and funded by the European Research Council (ERC) – aims to identify, analyse and compare national constitutional concepts and principles and to identify commonality as well as constitutional diversity in 10 EU Member States (Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, The Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden and Italy and/or Spain). Starting from real-life problems and concrete legal questions and cases (‘bottom-up’), and analysing the cases and constitutional materials, EuNaCon aims to improve the body of knowledge on common constitutional and traditions in Europe from within the legal systems, and to identify constitutional diversity.

The research will be carried out by a team (Monica Claes and 4 post doc’s) who will each have a different national legal background (and legal culture). This will force the members of the team to distance themselves from their own legal system and legal culture, to objectively observe and analyse their own and other systems, and to remain in constant debate with each other. This working in a trans-national team intends to overcome the general difficulties of comparative legal research (the bias of the researcher’s legal culture, the problem of language and knowledge of a particular legal system). The aim is to consistently challenge and test the analysis by each member of the team.

The cases and materials will be analysed in an interdisciplinary fashion, taking permanently into account their cultural, historical and political context, underlying beliefs and values, as well as legal style and culture, in order to make comparison meaningful.

A Task Force consisting of national experts, will serve as advisory board. They will be involved at the stage of case selection and supply the cases and materials. They will comment on the work of the team to ensure that their system is correctly understood and represented, that the pattern of legal reasoning is respected and that relevant legal and contextual elements are taken into account.

The project will cover the constitutional systems of France (semi-presidential system, constitutional council, decentralised unitary state), Germany (multi-party government, strong constitutional court with influential jurisprudence, federal state), the United Kingdom (one party government, parliamentary sovereignty, devolution), Italy and Spain (constitutions after constitutional moment, constitutional court, ongoing devolution), Belgium (federal state, ‘young’ constitutional court), the Netherlands (open Constitution, decentralised rather than devolved or federated state, no constitutional court, no constitutional review), the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (post-communist, young democracies, constitutional courts), as well as the EU. Where this is required by the topic under review, other legal systems may be added (e.g. the research on the ‘the territorial dimension’ may include research on other federal or federal-type systems in the EU or elsewhere). The choice for so many systems is mandated by the objective of the project, to identify ‘common constitutional traditions and principles’. To include more systems would require more resources and time. I submit that the chosen systems will give a representative view of ‘European constitutional law’.

Throughout the project, the subject of research will be national constitutional law, EU law and the relationship between both, against the background of their political, historical and societal context.

The project intends to start with some of the most fundamental issues of constitutional law, the ‘macro-constitutional questions’. These will be presented in more detail (see the headings "projects 1-4" in the left-hand menu). The EuNaCon project will open up avenues for future research in other areas of comparative constitutional law, such as specific fundamental rights, or church-state relations.

The results of the research will be published in the Ius Commune Casebook series.

Further information is available at the website of the EuNaCon Project.