Rethinking Judicial Narratives: The Court of Justice and the Treaty of Rome

In Great Judgments of the European Court of Justice, William Phelan invites readers to rethink a selection of the Court of Justice’s formative cases addressing the foundations of the (then) Community legal order. Most of these decisions, such as Van Gend en Loos1 and Costa v ENEL2 are well-known to European legal scholars; others, notably Pork Products,3 Dairy Products4 and Sheep Meat,5 perhaps less so.Great Judgments set its sights on challenging the received account of these decisions as the basis of a ‘new legal order’ in which, atypically among international treaty organisations, private litigants and national courts have acquired direct and powerful roles.6 Asserting that leading scholars have ‘missed the bigger picture’