INTRODUCTION Some twenty years ago, the European Court of Justice was accused of being an excessively activist judiciary. The purpose of this paper therefore, is to examine in what ways (if any), the ECJ has contributed to the development of European integration and to determine whether it has been exercising a legitimate judicial function in adopting its activist approach. The paper will commence with a brief history of European integration and the European Union, easing readers into understanding the impact of the ECJ on this doctrine. It will follow with an examination of the ECJ's role...
they do not have a right to develop novelty principles which speed up integration; their competence should be limited to interpretation. However it is the proposition of De Waele, with which this paper agrees, that criticism about the active function of the EU is often very selective and that judicial activism occurs in very few cases in comparison to most of the cases where judicial restraint is exercised. Ultimately the existence of Art 19 of the TEU legitimates the active approach of the EU in its promotion of integration.