Making the European Court Work: Nicola Catalano and the Origins of European Legal Integration

Forthcoming in “The Italian Influence on European Law: Judges and Advocates General, 1952-2000,” Gallo, Mastroianni, Nicola, and Cecchetti, eds. Edited volume under contract with Hart Publishing.

29 Pages Posted: 30 Jan 2023

See all articles by Tommaso Pavone

Tommaso Pavone

Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

Date Written: January 27, 2023

Abstract

Nicola Catalano is seldom included among the pantheon of Europe’s founders. To the extent that he is remembered, it is for stint as one of the first judges at the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In this chapter, I challenge this consensus to retrace the agents and struggles underlying the early development of the EU’s judicial order. I argue that Catalano made fundamental contributions to shaping European law, but these contributions occurred before and after his ECJ tenure. Catalano’s time at the ECJ fell as the fledgling Court was starved of cases, ignored by member states, and staffed with judges hostile to Catalano’s Eurofederalism. Catalano played a critical role in transforming this idle state of affairs – but only once he was removed from the Court and could mobilize European law as a lawyer. Through strategic litigation and public advocacy, Catalano was the first practitioner in Italy to push clients and judges to activate Article 177 of the Treaty of Rome: the preliminary reference procedure, which Catalano perceived as a transmission belt linking civil society, national judiciaries, and the ECJ. Catalano thus shaped the destiny of an institutional mechanism that he invited when he was part of the committee of jurists drafting the terms of the Treaty of Rome. While the preliminary reference procedure is widely acknowledged as the motor of European legal integration – the fuel that makes the European Court work – this chapter traces how this institutional development was highly uncertain, contingent, and dependent on the agency of entrepreneurs like Catalano, who blurred his roles as legal architect, judge, commentator, and attorney. Leveraging archival, interview, and secondary evidence to retrace Catalano’s professional life, I demonstrate that the development of the EU’s judicial order rested less on the supranational willpower of ECJ judges or faceless functionalist forces and more on the tireless entrepreneurship of “Euro-lawyers” determined to erode resistances to Europeanization within member states. These findings highlight how processes of institutional change hinge on agents who integrate insider expertise with outside mobilization and who balance their ideational commitments with tactical pragmatism.

Keywords: Nicola Catalano, European law, Euro-lawyers, European Court of Justice, ECJ, legal mobilization, European integration, institutional change, judicial politics

Suggested Citation

Pavone, Tommaso, Making the European Court Work: Nicola Catalano and the Origins of European Legal Integration (January 27, 2023). Forthcoming in “The Italian Influence on European Law: Judges and Advocates General, 1952-2000,” Gallo, Mastroianni, Nicola, and Cecchetti, eds. Edited volume under contract with Hart Publishing., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4339824 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4339824

Tommaso Pavone (Contact Author)

Department of Political Science, University of Toronto ( email )

105 St George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G8
Canada

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