Michel Gaudet, a law entrepreneur: The role of the legal service of the European executives in the invention of EC Law and the birth of the Common Market Law Review

Publishers Abstract:
The constitutionalization process of the EU legal and political order has been fully described and analysed by both law professors and political scientists who share a common perception of the European Court of Justice as its revolutionary and solitary author. In this regard, one of the major interests of the correspondence which is presented in this article is to shed new light on what is considered to be "the birth of EEC law": the landmark decisions of the Court of Justice in Van Gend & Loos (Feb 5, 1963) and Costa v ENEL (Jul 15, 1964), in which the Court laid the basis of two areas of its "constitutional doctrine", the direct effect of Treaty provisions and the primacy of EU law over all conflicting national rules including constitutional ones.

The correspondence between the head of the Legal Service of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, the French member of the Conseil d'Etat, Michel Gaudet, and his friend, the American lawyer Donald Swatland occurs in December 1957 and deals with the conditions under which the Court would be able to fully contribute as an institution to the construction of a federal Europe.