After the accession of several Central and Eastern European countries to the European Union in 2004, new challenges arose for their highest judicial institutions to define and shape the relationship between the national and European legal order. This paper assesses the first decade of the effort of the Slovak Constitutional Court (SCC) in interpreting the relationship between domestic and EU law via applying the concept of constitutional pluralism which presumes a specific relationship between the legal orders characterized by their heterarchical structure, mutual interaction and cooperation rather than of a hierarchical, monistic structure, governed by clash over dominance. Answering the research question how the SCC has positioned itself vis-à-vis the constitutional monism v. pluralism dilemma can offer an insight on the general relationship between domestic and EU law in Slovakia. By analysing statutory law, selected judgments and reviewing secondary literature, the paper argues that the SCC seems to have chosen the monistic, hierarchical approach to the relationship, having rejected constitutional pluralism. At the same time, this position is not articulated clearly enough due to the veil of secrecy that to some extent still prevails over the SCC’s doctrinal attitudes to EU law. The findings of the paper, which combines conceptual analysis of constitutional pluralism with review of relevant legal provisions and case law, demonstrate the need for a more active and straightforward approach of the SCC when dealing with the challenges of EU law., Max Steuer., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The puzzle of material constitution can be expressed in at least two ways. First, how can the constituting object and the constituted object, which are materially and spatially coincident, be regarded as different objects? Second, how can the constituting object and the constituted object, which are qualitatively distinct, be regarded as identical objects? Monists argue that the constituting and constituted objects are identical since they are materially and spatially coincident and the property differences between then are simply differences in description, perspective or context. In contrast, pluralists argue that the constituting and constituted objects are not identical even if they are materially and spatially coincident since they are qualitatively distinct. This paper proposes a solution to the puzzle of material constitution called ‘Fregean Monism’ (FM), and shows that it can better account for the property differences between the constituting and constituted objects without the need to regard them as two distinct objects. On the FM view, the puzzle of material constitution is partly a semantic puzzle and partly a metaphysical puzzle, and shows how a solution to the semantic part of the puzzle, based on the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, can yield a satisfactory solution to the metaphysical part of the puzzle. The key idea is that while the reference of a term picks out both the referent object and referent properties, the sense of the term determine which referent properties are picked out.