the europeanization of legal cultures The first generation of constitutional courts – the German and Italian courts –were founded in the early 1950s after the fall of the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The second generation – the Spanish and Portuguese constitutional courts – followed the demise of Franco’s and Salazar’s authoritarian regimes in the 1970s. The third generation – the constitutional courts of the post-communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe – were founded in the 1990s. Looking at the last wave of constitutional courts founded in Europe, we can recognize many interesting (national) stories. They are not only about their beginnings, or about the powerful role of the Venice Commission, but about active national movements towards new constitutional thinking. For instance, I have had the great pleasure to interview the first president of the Hungarian Constitutional Court (1990–1998), László Sólyom, who later became President of Hungary (2005–2010). According to Sólyom, it was not important for the ‘founding fathers’ of the Hungarian court to respect the traditional boundaries between private and public law or between national and foreign law. Among the first Hungarian Constitutional Court judges were a number of private law professors, including Roman law specialists, who even under the Communist regime had worked internationally and networked with their European colleagues. Sólyom has contributed to the academic debate about the (real or imagined) tension between the national and the international in law – or whether national legal scholarship is in danger because of so much international impact and the dominance of the English language. Using the termWeltliteratur, he emphasized the importance of being open towards foreign ideas: all the best ideas were studied, to be implemented in Hungarian constitutional law doctrine, and applied by the new constitutional court. The term ‘world literature’ included, of course, the ‘big books’ on constitutional law, but also discussions and practices in other European and non-European countries.6 6 See also László Sólyom, ‘The Role of Constitutional Courts in the Transition Democracy: With Special Reference to Hungary’, International Sociology 18/1 (2003), 3–31. 281
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=