Development of the European Law Studies in Spain

Abstract

The development of European Union law with respect to its content and sectoral division is inseparable from the evolution of the European integration process. In our approach this statement represents the correlation between widening and deepening, and the chain of treaty-based reforms within, first, the European Economic Community, and, later, the European Union. In the middle of the year 2011, the European Union comprises twenty-seven states, which joined the organization in different historical periods and times. In the various individual countries, general prescriptions and covenants are effective under the specific circumstances in the given state. These circumstances are defined by the time of the country’s accession to the European integration, its framework of condi-tions, the form and phases of the preliminaries, and the results of the accession ne-gotiations. Due to these facts, the application, adoption, integration and domestic reception of community law partly depends on the characteristics and traditions of the country under examination, as well as the concrete solutions employed in its political system. There exist states where the application of community law and its reception in the international legal system has been a dominant issue from the very beginning on the level of (higher) education. Spain may be regarded such a state; European Stu-dies and European Law Studies within it has been introduced at all universities and higher education institutions of the kingdom. The development and application of European Law Studies in Spain is deeply affected by the theoretical issues presented and analysed in this paper: possible future changes in the Spanish form of state, the imminent general constitutional reform, and, first and foremost, institutional and legal changes within the European Union.