Book excerpt: The success of European integration and the political stability and economic prosperity it offers to its members has found followers elsewhere. Several countries in different parts of world have been inclined to embark on projects of regional integration. Though the majority of them are limited to economic integration objectives, some, in particular, regional groups in Latin America, profess to attain ambitious political goals and are constructed emulating the EU institutional structure. In some cases, this structure includes a regional court of justice, entrusted with telling community law and solving differences between Member States. The aim of this book is to study the importance of such courts of justice as institutional actors for the development of regional integration. In such a project, the study of the EU and the European Court of Justice immediately presents itself as most relevant and important. However, the book expands the study beyond an examination of the EU to encompass a comparative approach with other regional courts of justice, in particular the Central American Court of Justice and, subsidiarily, the Andean Court of Justice. Such a comparison allows both to assess the important differences between the courts as well as between the integration processes and to draw certain common features at present and for the future institutional evolution of other regional integration blocs. Katrin Nyman-Metcalf has a PhD in Law from Uppsala University in Sweden, specialised in Public International and EU law. She is Associate Professor at Riga Graduate School of Law, Latvia, and Concordia University, Estonia, as well as visiting professor at several other European universities. Apart from the academic work, she works as a legal consultant mainly in East and Central Europe with legislation, institution buildýng and EU accession preparation. Ioannis Papageorgiou has studied Law in Athens, Comparative Politics in Paris and holds a PhD in Development Cooperation, with specialization in Latin America, from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He is an attorney-at-law in Athens, a consultant on migration and refugee matters and, since 2002, he teaches international migration in the School of Sociology of the University of the Aegean. He also taught EU Politics and Constitution in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.