Eu Exclusive Contracting Rights

This paper discusses the exclusive treaty-making power of the European Union through positive study and case study.The paper analyzes the provisions of the three founding treaties related to the community's legal personality, and holds that the EU has internal legal personality. The paper makes a comparative study on the EU's external legal personality under the three pillars and draws a conclusion that under the Amsterdam Treaty the EU has external legal personality, which is the legal base of the treaty-making power of the EU.After expounding the explicit and implicit treaty-making power of the EU, the paper goes further into its exclusive treaty-making power. While the EU's explicit exclusive treaty-making power is mainly created by the instruments setting up the community, the EU has also acquired exclusive treaty-making power with the expiration of the transitional period. The doctrine of implicit exclusive treaty-making power evolved principally in the cases of the European Court. From the ERTA case, the Kramer Case, the Rhine Opinion to the Fisheries Case, the Court made it clear that the community's occupation of a specific field denied the member states parallel treaty-making power, and that the community occupied a specific field as long as its first steps in the field demonstrated its intention to occupy the field. In the Rubber Opinion the Court stated that the community acquired exclusive treaty-making power in a particular field in which per se it did not deserve to have power, if it was ancillary to another subject in which the community had exclusive power.The paper investigates, through a series of cases, the effect of the treaties made exclusively by the EU on the member states, and finds out that those treaties are part of the EU Law, have direct applicability and are of supremacy compared with the domestic laws of the member states.