Constitutionalism, the Community Court and international law

The purpose of this article is not to attempt to establish whether or not the EC legal system is a ‘self-contained regime’ in the sense implied by Simma. It is submitted that given the origin of that system as part of the international legal order, as a system which the Court itself described as ‘a new legal order of international law’ EC law cannot be conceived as totally distinct or self-contained. Nor, in this author's contention, is there much to be gained from such an approach as a contribution to the understanding of the current state of the relationship between international and European law. This article takes a rather different approach to the analysis of European law as a separate or distinct branch of international law without attempting to assess just how absolute or complete that process of separation might be.