Constitutional Justice in the Federal States of Europe

In a book published to mark Canada’s 150th birthday, I tried to show, based on a comparison between Canada and Belgium, that “in federal states, the judicial order and the judges who comprise that order do not necessarily have the same status or play the same role throughout the institutional system. The case law they produce is closely linked to the specific dynamics of the federal state concerned, and is also influenced by the fundamental principles underlying the sharing of powers in the state and the judges’ approach to interpretation.