Miguel Maduro
Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice

"The Operation of the European Court of Justice in the European Legal, Political and
Social Context: The Views of an
Academic and Participant Observer"

Monday, 13 September 2004
11:00 a.m.
Lubar Commons
Professor Maduro is one of eight Advocate-Generals of the European Court of Justice and a leading scholar of European Union (EU) law. He will address the role of the Court of Justice in the construction of the European Union. He will examine how the Court balances the increased demand for its use as EU law expands with the Court’s limited resources. He will, for example, address the potential impact of enlargement of the EU to twenty-five member states on the Court’s operation. Professor Maduro will, in particular, examine the relation of the European Court of Justice to national courts, on which it depends for EU law to be effective. He will also speak briefly about the internal operations of the Court of Justice and the role of the Advocate-General.

Before accepting the appointment to Advocate General at the European Court of Justice, Miguel Poiares Maduro was Professor of European and International Law at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He continues an association with Universidade Nova de Lisboa as well as a number of other positions including external professorships at the College of Europe (Natolin) Instituto Ortega y Gasset (Madrid) and at the Institute of European Studies of Macao (China). He also taught at the European Masters on Human Rights and Democratisation and the Dubrovnik Summer Academy on Human Rights. He holds a Doctor of Laws from the European University Institute (Florence) and has been Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar at Harvard Law School. He is Co-Director of the Academy of International Trade Law (Macao) and is currently a member of the editorial board of the European Law Journal where he has co-edited with Joseph Weiler the Special Book Review Issue. He is also co-editor with Francis Snyder of the Hart Publishers Series Studies in European Law and Integration. He was the first winner of the Rowe and Maw Prize and winner of the Prize Obiettivo Europa (for the best PhD thesis at the EUI). He is the author of We the Court - The European Court of Justice and the European Economic Constitution (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 1997), which applied comparative institutional analysis to and is currently preparing with Damian Chalmers a textbook on EU Law to be published by Cambridge University Press. He has published in several languages on issues regarding EU Law, European Constitutionalism, International Trade Law, Governance Issues, and Human Rights.