Tuesday 1 December 2009

Treaty of Lisbon

One of my pet gripes has been overtaken by events, at long last: with the Treaty of Lisbon coming into operation today, Community law is replaced by European Union law - which in common usage (even among lawyers who should have known better) it did a long time ago. The Court of Justice becomes the Court of Justice of the European Union (though Euraotom still exists, and it has jurisdiction over the Euratom treaty) though no doubt people will continue to irritate me (and Swiss, Norwegians, Ukranians, Russians, Byelorussians, Modovans, Icelanders, and others, even Turks) by calling it the European Court of Justice. The old name, and the term "Community law", will still be correct for anything that happened yesterday, or earlier.

The Court of First Instance has become the General Court, making it even less obvious what it's for - rather like the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market, which provides so much of its work.

Given that I still think in terms of Article 30 to 36 (though I have adjusted to Articles 85 and 86 becoming 81 and 82), I imagine I will be getting the terms wrong for some years yet. But how nice finally to live in a European Union.

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