Recenti sviluppi sul ruolo delle Corti nazionali di ultimo grado nella corretta applicazione del diritto dell'Unione europea

This essay focuses on the implementation of EU law by lawyers and domestic courts and on the new role of the highest Courts in the spread of EU law. Throughout the analysis of three recent decisions of the French Cour de cassation, the Spanish Constitutional Court and the Italian Corte di Cassazione, there seems to be a new trend emerging, an hermeneutical approach that refers to EU law and to the ECJ’s case-law for solving the decision at stake.The decisions, which deal with different matters, are equally relevant in the way they represented and implemented EU law, imposing considerably high standards of professional expertise on practitioners. Both lawyers and judges cannot plainly ignore any reference to the Court of justice’s case law when it has solved a series of identical cases, nor keep on with their own “traditional” approach based only on the national law and jurisprudence. The analysis suggests that national high courts are becoming key players in EU law, besides the preliminary reference to the Court of Justice