КОНСТИТУЦІЙНЕ ПРАВО ЯК ПРОВІДНА ГАЛУЗЬ ПРАВА ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКОГО СОЮЗУ

The article underlines the conceptual look at the role and place of constitutional law in the system of EU law and provides its complex characteristics according to formal and material conditions. The work is based on the hypothesis that the role and place of the constitutional law in the system of EU law are similar to those characterizing the similar field in any national law system, democratic state, with features stipulated by the supranational nature of this system of law. It`s substantiated an opinion that the formation of the EU law as an autonomous supranational system of law includes not only the accumulation and integration of the corresponding set of legal acts, but also its gradual differentiation with selection of individual branches and institutions. The leading role in the EU legal system, as well as in national legal systems, is occupied by the constitutional law, owing primarily to its subject of legal regulation. Attention is payed to the fact that after the failure of the common European constitution draft, the term “constitution” in the EU legal system is used exclusively in the substantive sense, and the constitution itself is unwritten (multi-source, combined), like the British one. At the same time, the system of sources of EU constitutional law is characterized by diversity and consists of three levels (subsystems) that regulate the fundamental political and legal relations associated with European integration: primary law, secondary law, common law and case law. It is noted that the core of the subject of EU constitutional law consists of two blocks of public relations: a) relations determining the institutional and functional organization of public authority in the EU; b) relations characterizing the foundations of the legal status of an individual in the EU. These basic political and legal relations are the matrix that determines the formation and development of the relevant general institutions of the EU constitutional law. The example of the constitutional foundations of EU civil society demonstrates that the process of segregation of some institutions in the branches structure of the EU constitutional law continues. At the same time, in general, the structuring of constitutional and legal institutions in the EU repeats the genesis of national constitutional law, at least the one that took place in the states of continental Europe. Attention is payed to the fact that the training of legal professionals in Ukraine must meet the challenges that legal education in the context of European integration. One of the important steps in this direction should be the introduction into the educational process of law schools in our country of disciplines devoted to certain branches of EU law, including the EU constitutional law as the leading branch of this legal system.