Precedents And Case Based Reasoning In The European Court Of Justice

Marc Jacob analyses in depth the most important justificatory and decision-making tool of one of the world's most powerful courts.

Marc Jacob analyses in depth the most important justificatory and decision-making tool of one of the world's most powerful courts.

This collection examines case-based reasoning in constitutional adjudication; that is, how courts decide on constitutional cases by referring to their own prior case law and the case law of other national, foreign, and international courts. Argumentation based on judicial authority is now fundamental to the resolution of constitutional disputes. At the same time, it is the most common form of reasoning used by courts. This volume shows not only the strengths and weaknesses of such argumentation, but also its serious methodological shortcomings. The book is comparative in nature, with individual chapters examining similar problems that different courts have resolved in different ways. The research covers three types of courts; namely the civil law constitutional courts of Germany, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary; the common law supreme courts of the United States, Canada, and Australia; and the European international courts represented by the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union. The authors are distinguished scholars from various countries who specialise in constitutional justice issues. This book will be of interest to legal theorists and practitioners, and will be especially insightful for constitutional court judges. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book contends that, with regard to the likelihood of confusion standard, European trademark law applies the average consumer incoherently and inconsistently. To test this proposal, it presents an analysis of the horizontal and vertical level of harmonization of the average consumer. The horizontal part focuses on similar fictions in areas of law adjacent to European trademark law (and in economics), and the average consumer in unfair competition law. The vertical part focuses on European trademark law, represented mainly by EU trademark law, and the trademark laws of the UK, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The book provides readers with a better understanding of key aspects of European trademark law (the average consumer applied as part of the likelihood of confusion standard) and combines relevant law and practices with theoretical content and other related areas of law (and economics). Accordingly, it is an asset for policymakers and practitioners, as well as general readers with an interest in intellectual property law and theory.

Präjudizien haben heute in den unterschiedlichsten Rechtssystemen eine erhebliche Bedeutung für die juristische Entscheidungsfindung. Umso mehr besteht daher das Bedürfnis, deren Entstehungsbedingungen und deren tatsächlichen Einfluss auf die Praxis zu verstehen. Neben dogmatischen Arbeiten wurden in den letzten Jahren vermehrt Studien publiziert, die mit empirischen Methoden sowie sozialwissenschaftlichen Perspektiven der Praxis nationaler wie auch internationaler Gerichte näherkommen wollten. Das gab Anlass verschiedene theoriebezogene wie auch empirische Forschungszugänge, die im Zuge einer Konferenz präsentiert wurden, gemeinsam in einem Buch zu verbinden. So bietet das Buch unter anderem eine Analyse des Einflusses der linguistischen Praxis auf die Entscheidungsbegründungen des EuGH, die Erstellung eines Zitationsnetzwerks sowie ganz generell die Diskussion über den Wert neuer Methoden und Perspektiven in der Arbeit mit und der Forschung zu Präjudizien.

This study explores the use of precedents in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It argues that a strategic use of precedent-based discourses aids the Court in developing its jurisprudence autonomously; that is, independent of the political preferences of EU member states. The study is based on a long-term assessment of CJEU case law in the politically sensitive area of immigration law. It traces the Court’s rulings in this area from the 1970s up until the most recent period. The study identifies a series of consistent discursive patterns that slowly, but surely, moved EU immigration law beyond what member states had intended. The work takes an interdisciplinary approach, engaging with both political science and legal discussions on the Court of Justice and its role in processes of European integration.

The task of the European Court of Justice is to ensure that the law is observed in interpreting and applying treaties. This duty is carried out in a transnational constitutional environment where interpretation and application are, to a large extent, divorced from each other. An array of approaches to assessing the Court's work already exists. The distinct underlying assumptions of each perspective affect how Court practice is interpreted and evaluated. In terms of legal interpretation, at the one extreme would be those who subscribe to a historical-originalist - or conserving - approach, and, at the other, those subscribing to an uncritically teleological or dynamic approach, premised on furthering integration. Neither extreme necessarily reflects, in either descriptive or normative terms, a fair or realistic understanding of the Court, its work, and the outcomes of legal interpretation. Even if, in reality, the differences were more a matter of degree, developing a better balanced approach is useful. The approach advocated in this book is called Court of Justice legal reasoning. The approach is critical towards offering generalizations concerning the Court's work based on purposively chosen case law, downplaying the role of law in not only facilitating but also restraining the Court's choices, and overemphasizing teleology or integration as pre-designated and permanent explanatory factors of legal evolution. The Court of Justice legal reasoning approach is firmly anchored to actual case law analysis, instead of abstract legal theory, which ensures it does not become wholly disconnected from the everyday of courts. Moreover, the approach takes into account how the Court keeps applying its relatively conventional self-assumed criteria of legal interpretation, considers interpretations offered in preliminary rulings in their systemic and factual context, and generally views the Court as the constitutional court of a legal order. Finally, the approach builds on sincerely listening to the Court: considering the meaning of silences in reasoning, ways of restrictive interpretation, and the distinction between singular cases and lines of cases in defining the degree of universality of interpretations included in them.