Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe. By Karen J. Alter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 284p. $60.00

Before 1990, American political and even legal scholarship paid little attention to the mystery and the marvel of the role played by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in constituting the European Community (EC; now European Union, or EU) as something very like a transnational, federated state with its own higher law constitution and supremacy of union-level law, enforceable and enforced against member-state (i.e., member-country) laws or constitutional provisions to the contrary. Legal scholars Eric Stein and Joseph Weiler and political scientist Mary Volcansek (with a comparative judicial politics approach) had produced sustained bodies of scholarship on the subject, and Stuart Scheingold had offered a book on it back in 1971 (which took an international relations approach), but not much else was available for the curious American academic. The decade of the 1990s changed this picture. Now a generation of young scholars and some more recently engaged established scholars have taken up the challenge of attempting to understand this remarkable, and in many ways unprecedented, phenomenon.