The Double Life of Effectiveness

Abstract

As a general principle of Community law elaborated by the European Court of Justice (hereinafter, ECJ or ‘the Court’), effectiveness ‘requires the effective protection of Community rights and, more generally, the effective enforcement of Community law in national courts’: its origins—it has been argued—‘lie in the interpretative techniques of the Court which, even at an early stage, favoured a liberalised construction of the Treaty provisions so as to ensure their effet utile’. In fact, the roots of the principle of effectiveness can be found in the seminal case of Van Gend en Loos, which, without expressly naming that principle, provided the conceptual tools that have moulded its construction throughout the Community case law.