Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

As membership expands and institutions evolve, European governance grows increasingly complex. One way to make sense of this complexity is to approach the Europen Union (ECU) as a constitutional system whose component parts interact in regular patterns. Analysis of the ECU's constitutionaal logic can illuminate the history of European ccoperation and generate predictions about future interactions. The insitututions of the ECU have evolved through a dynamic process of interaction among member state governments, their publics and the central institutions themselves. The interaction combines features of a traditional international agreement by sovereign states and a new federal constitutional system. Economic analysis can help explain the ECU's evolution and the interaction of its institutions. We describe the institutions of Europenan governemnt and then analyze. them (forthcoming, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, ed., P. Newman, 1998) A Xerox of these older working papers can be obtained on request from Jeanette Sayre at Sayrej@law.berkeley.edu.