Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)

The Court of Justice of the European Union is the judicial institution of the European Union, based in Luxembourg, comprising the Court of Justice proper and the General Court. It traces its origin to the Court of Justice of the European Coal and Steel Community, established by the 1951 Treaty of Paris and first sitting in 1952, and was renamed and reorganized as European integration deepened through the Treaties of Rome, Maastricht and Lisbon. Its central function is ensuring that EU law is interpreted and applied uniformly across member states, chiefly through the preliminary ruling procedure, in which a national court facing a question of EU law refers it to the CJEU for a binding interpretation before deciding the case itself. Landmark CJEU rulings such as Van Gend en Loos (1963) and Costa v ENEL (1964) established the doctrines of direct effect and the supremacy of EU law over conflicting national law, doctrines found nowhere in the founding treaties' text but built by the Court itself, in a manner comparative lawyers have long compared to the Marshall Court's construction of judicial review in Marbury v Madison.