63
Second working session — The impact
of, and is construed with regard to, national legal concepts and traditions.
National law, in turn, is supplemented by EU law and even ‘europeanised’
insofar as legal concepts and institutions migrate from Member States to the
Union and back to the national legal orders. In some way we see the ‘principle
of best practices’ as a driving force for innovation and also some convergence
of the legal orders involved. One example is the principle of proportionality;
it seems to have made its way from the German legal system to the EU and,
through Union law back to the national law of the others (
25
). Another exam-
ple are the principles of access to information and transparency: they came
from the Scandinavian traditions, found acceptance in European environ-
mental law applied by the European institutions and are progressively applied
also in the national legal orders Union-wide (
26
).
d. ‘Embedded autonomy’ and multilevel constitutionalism
Autonomy of the EU legal order has to be understood as an ‘embedded
autonomy’; this qualification corresponds to an understanding of the EU and
each of the national legal orders as forming one composed constitutional sys-
tem, which is established by the citizens of the Union according to the princi-
ples of multilevel constitutionalism (
27
).
The American and the Chinese legal orders are autonomous to each other.
There is no legal constraint for them to interact. In contrast, the EU and the
national legal orders are constituted by, and they affect in each instance, the
same individuals, be it as national or as Union citizens: They are made to in-
teract for their citizens’ benefit. The term ‘responsive legal pluralism’, intro-
duced by Lars Viellechner in the broader context of the global system (
28
), may
best describe the idea: each national legal order is embedded in a greater legal
(
25
) See Pache,
Der Grundsatz der Verhältnismäßigkeit in der Rechtsprechung der Gerichte
der Europäischen Gemeinschaften
, NVwZ 1999, p. 1033 et seq.; see also Jürgen Schwarze,
Europäisches Verwaltungsrecht, Entstehung und Entwicklung im Rahmen der Europäischen
Gemeinschaft
, 2nd ed. (Nomos, Baden-Baden 20059, p. 664 et seq, especially as regards the
Italian constitutional law, ibid., p. 675 et seq. and the Irish constitutional law ibid., p. 681
et seq.
(
26
) With an overview: Ingolf Pernice, Verfassungs- und europarechtliche Aspekte der
Transparenz staatlichen Handelns,
in: Alexander Dix/Gregor Franßen/Michael Kloepfer/
Peter Schaar/Friedrich Schoch (eds.), Informationsfreiheit und Informationsrecht. Jahrbuch
2013 (lexxion, Berlin 2014), forthcoming.
(
27
) See supra notes 12 and 15.
(
28
) Lars Viellechner, Responsiver Pluralismus. Zur Entwicklung eines transnationalen
Kollisionsrechts, in: 51 Der Staat (2012), p. 559.
