The Saga May Continue: On the Intricate Dialogue Between the Constitutional Court of Romania and the Court of Justice of the European Union

Abstract

This study tracks the evolution of the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of Romania (CC) vis-à-vis the complex relationship between national law and European Union (EU) law. In this study, the decisions issued by the CC were identified, examined, and grouped chronologically, and based on how the Court related to EU law, its jurisprudential evolution was periodised. This relationship is reflected in the jurisprudence of the CC and of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). If this relationship was initially one of collaboration, subsequent jurisprudential tensions arose between the two courts, especially in terms of reconciling the principle of the supremacy of the Constitution with that of the priority of application of EU law. The doctrine of counter-limits, embraced by the CC, according to the German model, has a special role to play in this equation. This study brings to fore all these aspects in an exhaustive way and tries to provide a truthful picture of how the national legal order interacts with that of the EU through the lens of the jurisprudence of both, the CC and CJEU.