EUROPEAN POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS — Chapter 5, Exercise 1
Costa vs. Handelsgesellschaft
====================================================================

QUESTION:
Explain the real, precise difference in scope between what Costa v.
ENEL (1964) established and what Internationale Handelsgesellschaft
(1970) added on top of it.

SOLUTION:

Costa v. ENEL (1964) established that EU law takes precedence over
conflicting ORDINARY national law — the everyday statutes and
regulations a national parliament passes. This was already a
significant claim, since it meant a national legislature couldn't
simply pass a later law to override its own EU obligations.

Internationale Handelsgesellschaft (1970) went considerably further.
It held that EU law's validity cannot be challenged even on the
grounds that it conflicts with FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS enshrined in a
member state's own national CONSTITUTION — the highest, most
protected tier of law within any given member state. No provision of
national law "of any nature whatsoever," the Court said, can override
EU law.

The precise difference in scope, then, is the level of national law
being overridden: Costa reaches ordinary statutes; Handelsgesellschaft
reaches all the way up to a member state's own constitutional and
fundamental-rights protections — a genuinely larger and more
controversial claim, which is exactly why the Court paired it with
its own self-imposed commitment to protect fundamental rights as
general principles of EU law in the same ruling.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
---------------------------
The strongest answers name the specific tier of national law each
case reaches (ordinary law vs. constitutional/fundamental-rights law)
rather than describing both cases as simply "EU law wins." Noting the
Court's own simultaneous compromise in Handelsgesellschaft shows an
understanding that the doctrine's expansion wasn't unconditional even
at the moment it was made.