Mummery, Sir John --- "Links with National Courts" [2008] ELECD 227; in Moser, Philip; Sawyer, Katrine (eds), "Making Community Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: Making Community Law

Editor(s): Moser, Philip; Sawyer, Katrine

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847201379

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Links with National Courts

Author(s): Mummery, Sir John

Number of pages: 15

Extract:

4. Links with national courts
Sir John Mummery1

THEME
`Links' normally conjure up the image of a golf course on sandy dunes close
to the estuaries and the incoming tides, which, for Lord Denning, were
metaphors of the relationship of English law with the European Community
law.2 The Oxford English Dictionary offers other examples of English usage
and what better than `links' to describe `the divisions in a string of sausages or
black puddings'?
The links of the European Community with national courts are not of the
sausage or black pudding sort. In essence the links are informal and formal
channels of communication serving the common purpose of constructive and
structured judicial conversation and co-operation between national courts and
the European Court of Justice. The shared goal is making sense of this
uniquely ambitious legal order and, above all, making it work.
National courts decide cases. When it is necessary to do so, they ask the
Court of Justice to supply them with authoritative rulings on the interpretation
of Community law for them to use in deciding cases in their own legal
systems.3 The realistic aim is not perfection, which is impossible, but an
acceptable level of uniformity in the interpretation of Community law and its
local application and enforcement by the national courts in Member States.


INFORMAL LINKS
My experience of informal and formal links with the European Court of
Justice spans the last 25 years, first as a barrister, then as a first instance judge
...