ELTE Law Journal 2018/2 edition has been published

It is well-known that, following the change of regime in the Eastern European region in the early 1990s, all countries applied for membership of the European Union almost immediately. European economic integration was already visible in the way the internal market was functioning in EU Member States, in Western European countries; economic development and the emergence of social welfare were also desirable goals for Eastern European countries. The Association Agreements were concluded within a few years, but accession negotiations were delayed, and Europe was reunited almost a decade and a half later, on 1 May 2004.

Since then, the experience and knowledge gained in the course of fifteen years has been interpreted in many ways. Different questions and answers arise when looking at this period from a political, economic or legal point of view. In this celebratory edition, we intended to analyse the role of the third branch of power, the Hungarian judicature.

The authors of this thematic publication include both judges and academics. The judge authors are members of the European Law Advisors Network (ELAN), set up by the President of the National Office for the Judiciary. In addition to their judicial work, members of the ELAN receive regular training on EU law and they – on a voluntary basis – assist their colleagues in answering EU law-related questions. The academic authors are all faculty members at the ELTE Faculty of Law and they have been teaching, observing, documenting and analyzing EU-related issues in Hungarian case law since the accession.

Our aim was to present the most important and interesting questions in EU law that have risen in the course of the first 15 years in a documentary volume, reflecting the Hungarian judicial system and Hungarian legal literature. We hope that, after reading these studies, you will agree with us that the experiences of these years may be summed up in line with Walter Hallstein’s idea: ‘He who is not optimistic about European things is not realistic.’

The 2018/2 edition of ELTE Law Journal can be accessed here.