History and development

Initially, the Consultation procedure was the primary interplay of the institutions. Under it, Council must wait (unless it initiates an emergency procedure) for the EP’s opinion before adopting the legislation. This possibility for delay was in the early days the EP’s only weapon.

The role of the European Parliament in this institutional triangle has been gradually strengthened. Major landmarks in this gradual strengthening process have been

· the transferral of budget responsibilities during the early 70s,

· the first direct elections in 1979,

· the introduction of the Cooperation procedure with the Single European Act (1986/87) and

· the codecision procedure with the Maastricht Treaty (1993/93), whose scope was expanded considerably by the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997/99) and the Treaty of Nice (2001).

The development of law of the European Community has been largely moulded by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In the landmark case of Van Gend en Loos in 1963, the ECJ ruled that the European Community, through the will of Member States expressed in the Treaty of Rome, "constitutes a new legal order of international law for the benefit of which the states have limited their sovereign rights albeit within limited fields."

The distinction between European Community (EC) law and European Union law is that based on the Treaty structure of the European Union. The European Community constitutes one of the 'three pillars' of the European Union and concerns the social and economic foundations of the single market. The second and the third pillars were created by the Treaty of the European Union (the Maastricht Treaty) and involve Common Security and Defence Policy and Internal Security. Decision-making under the second and third pillars is not subject to majority voting at present. The Maastricht Treaty created the Justice and Home Affairs pillar as the third pillar. Subsequently, the Treaty of Amsterdam transferred the areas of illegal immigration, visas, asylum, and judicial co-operation to the European Community (the first pillar). Now Police and Judicial Co-operation in Criminal Matters is the third pillar. Justice and Home Affairs now refers both to the fields that have been transferred to the EC and the third pillar.

Several principles such as subsidiarity, proportionality, the principle of conferral, and the precautionary principle have become prominent in the development of European Union law. Scholars such as Catherine Barnard argue that the Four Freedoms form the substantive law of the EU: free movement of goods, services, capital, and labour within the internal market of the EU.