ABSTRACT
The entry of the United Kingdom (UK) into the European Communities (EC) made necessary a blending of two quite different legal backgrounds, fusing the civil law, mainly derived from codes which are carefully constructed and structured and devised on legal theory, with the Common Law, originally developed on a case-by-case basis, pragmatic, practical, but unsystematic. To make matters worse, the written constitutions of the Six EC states, which underpinned the structures of the EC, differed in many respects from the unwritten constitution of the UK, rooted in custom and conventions. The blending of two such diverse systems was never going to be easy. So it is not surprising that this situation appeared at first sight to raise formidable problems for lawyers. The Six founding members had no such problems. They were all devotees of a closely-related civil law, and with modifications their laws were all derived from the Code Napoléon. They therefore had no fundamental difficulties in assimilating a common text. Whitehall lawyers and government ministers were conscious of the difficulties, or they soon became aware of them, and it was only after close examination that the obstacles proved less formidable. This chapter examines the legal and constitutional issues involved, outlines how they were explored and assessed, and then focuses in particular on the ability of the UK's corpus of laws, its judicature and its political institutions to absorb the obligations imposed by the Treaties. It does not tackle the broader question of whether or not the consequent changes, in particular the abrogation of certain powers of the Crown and Parliament, loosely often referred to as loss of sovereignty, were acceptable as a matter of policy.
