On Wednesday, 22 March 2023, in the framework of the Italian National Day at the College of Europe in Natolin, the College of Europe was glad to host Prof. Amedeo ARENA for an evening talk titled "How EU Law became Supreme: the making of Costa v. ENEL".
About the talk:
This talk examined the making of the European Court of Justice’s landmark ruling in Costa v. ENEL (1964). It placed that ruling in the context of the nuclear deterrence dynamics the Cold War and of the political developments occurred in Italy between the 1950s and the 1960s, leading to the nationalization of electricity and the establishment of the State-owned electricity monopolist ENEL.
The talk provided a biographical sketch of the four lawyers who contributed to the making of the case: the lawyers Flaminio Costa and Gian Galeazzo Stendardi, the judges Antonio Carones and Vittorio Emanuele Fabbri. Regard is also had to the fundamental contribution of the Italian Constitutional Court, which ruled on the Costa v. ENEL case in February 1964, of the Legal Service of the European Communities, of the oral argument before the ECJ, and of the judgment’s reception in Italy. The talk was complemented by a presentation including photographs, court documents, newspaper clippings, and other relevant documents.
The talk was previously presented at Oxford and is based on a paper published by Prof. ARENA on the European Journal of International Law.
About the speaker:
Dr Amedeo ARENA is Full Professor of European Union at the Faculty of Law of the University of Naples Federico II (est. 1224). He graduated in Law from the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", holds LLM degrees from King's College London and New York University (where he was also a Fulbright Fellow), and completed a PhD at Federico II University. He visited at Oxford University, UC Berkeley, University College London, and the University of Tokyo. He is currently a De Gasperi Fellow at the Historical Archives of the European Union and he serves as the Principal Investigator of "EuroPAN", a 3-year research project seeking to re-read the leading cases of the European Court of Justice in their original context, by focusing on their Procedures, Actors, and Narratives. He published extensively on EU Law and EU Legal History and his works have been cited by the European Court of Justice (Advocates General Bobek and Szpunar), the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, and the Portuguese Constitutional Court.