Jurist Advocacy Movements in Europe and the Andes: How Lawyers Help Promote International Legal Integration

Abstract:     
Neo-functionalist accounts European legal integration stress how individuals (lawyers, judges, litigants, legal scholars) pursuing their narrow self-interest through supranational means drove the establishment and penetration of the ECJ's doctrines into national legal orders. Neo-functionalist theory suggests that merely transplanting the ECJ's structure into other contexts will allow self-interest to fuel legal integration. By contrast, this article shows how the ECJ's early success was aided by the coordination and encouragement of ideologically driven jurist advocacy movements. After documenting the role of jurist advocacy movements in the constitutionalization of the European legal order, the paper then examines how the absence of a jurist's advocacy movement hinders legal integration. The Andean Community Tribunal of Justice (ATJ), created in 1984, was modeled on the ECJ - it can hear legal challenges raised by private actors, and it has incorporated the ECJ's doctrines of Direct Effect and the Supremacy of Andean law. But it lacks a jurist advocacy movement, which has arguably hindered its ability to follow the ECJ's path of doctrinal development that advances legal integration - notwithstanding the reality that the ATJ is the 3rd most active international court, having issued over 1400 rulings to date.

Working Paper Series