(European) living memory
Tue, Sep 8, 2009 posted by Pescatorius
Ten years ago, a remarkable Italian labour lawyer and comparatist died.
He was an outstanding labour lawyer, indeed: he founded the Bologna School of Labour Law and left an impressive array of disciples who still work under the intellectual background of their mentor.
However, what makes this man extraordinary explains why AdjudicatingEurope is now writing about him: Federico Mancini, the Advocate General, the Judge at the ECJ, the intellectual, the writer, the President of the ECJ that he never became, has left a precious and inspiring legacy to the generations of European lawyers that followed him.
A true European he was. Seventeen years as a sitting member of the ECJ enabled him to deliver some of the most impressive pieces of legal literature in the history of the Court: the Opinion in Foto-Frost, rapporteur in the revolutionary Marleasing judgment, an outspoken European federalist in his writings, Federico Mancini was a lawyer made of the stuff lawyers are now hardly made of.
But where are today’s Mancinis? Surprisingly, after fifty years of European integration, they are becoming scarce and are hard to come across in places where many of them should be found.
There are many fake Mancinis too. There are fake federalists that use terms such as «constitutional identity», «pluralism», or «democracy» as a means to weaken the authority of the ECJ and other Institutions. There are also fake Europeans that consider that EU Law is a cosmopolitan composite that needs to kneel and bow before the sacred cow of «national cultures and traditions». And there will always be those who never understood a single word of what Mancini wrote and did throughout his life.
Who are the most dangerous of the three phoney Mancinis?
Quite appropriately, the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre will hold on September 15th and 16th a special conference celebrating, ten years after his disappearance, the memory of the judge, academic and writer Federico Mancini. Aharon Barak, Dieter Grimm, Giuliano Amato, Allan Rosas and Stephen Breyer, among others, will be speaking.
We warmly incite you to attend and pay tribute.
Long live the Mancinis and those who truly honour, through their honest work and intellect, the life and oeuvre of this outstanding European.
-Pescatorius
September 16th, 2009 at 5:28 am
I am not sure, dear Pescatorius, that the Court needs more “Mancinis,” as you describe them. I think it needs more judges who take their job at the Court to be judging, not integrating Europe (let’s take Mangold as an example of such a case I would condemn without going into definitional battles over what judging is and what it is not). Legal integration (though important at its time) has exhausted its possibilities. By controversial and poorly reasoned judgments (I understand that they often must be so due to the way the Court works) the Court only looses its credibility - which is certainly not the “fake Mancinis”‘ guilt.