The Danish accession to the European Communities 1973 provides – together with the cases of Ireland and the UK – a first example of how more than 20 years of accumulated legal canon from the EC could be integrated en bloc into the national legal spaces.
Community law, constructed as a legal form sui generis on the European legal field during the 1950’s and 1960’s, contain fundamental, legal-logical discrepancies to national law. Moreover, few legal actors in Denmark had practical knowledge within the area, leaving them prone to considering this new form of law a threat to their old positions on the legal field.
In this article, I will show how the traditional symbolic hierarchies in Danish law were amalgamated following the accession in a process were the central administration won terrain relative to practitioners and judges concerning the right to define community law in Denmark.