The Limits Of Legal Reasoning And The European Court Of Justice

Gerard Conway explains how judges of the ECJ should be understood as sharing the same interpretative perspective as the law-maker.

Can a jurisprudential approach help lawyers and legal philosophers to understand the sources, organization, and main features of European Community (EC) law? How does the European Court of Justice interpret EC law and justify its decisions? This study examines these questions and related issues--analyzing EC law and the decision-making process of the European Court of Justice from a legal theoretical perspective. The justification of legal decisions is a crucial issue in legal and political theory, with courts achieving legitimation through their practice of justification. This study also assesses the justificatory practice of the European Court of Justice and how its jurisprudential approach contributes to an understanding of European integration.

The European Court of Justice is widely acknowledged to have played a fundamental role in developing the constitutional law of the EU, having been the first to establish such key doctrines as direct effect, supremacy and parallelism in external relations. Traditionally, EU scholarship has praised the role of the ECJ, with more critical perspectives being given little voice in mainstream EU studies. From the standpoint of legal reasoning, Gerard Conway offers the first sustained critical assessment of how the ECJ engages in its function and offers a new argument as to how it should engage in legal reasoning. He also explains how different approaches to legal reasoning can fundamentally change the outcome of case law and how the constitutional values of the EU justify a different approach to the dominant method of the ECJ.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has often been characterised both as a motor of integration and a judicial law-maker. To what extent is this a fair description of the Court's jurisprudence over more than half a century? The book is divided into two parts. Part one develops a new heuristic theory of legal reasoning which argues that legal uncertainty is a pervasive and inescapable feature of primary legal material and judicial reasoning alike, which has its origin in a combination of linguistic vagueness, value pluralism and rule instability associated with precedent. Part two examines the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU against this theoretical framework. The author demonstrates that the ECJ's interpretative reasoning is best understood in terms of a tripartite approach whereby the Court justifies its decisions in terms of the cumulative weight of purposive, systemic and literal arguments. That approach is more in line with orthodox legal reasoning in other legal systems than is commonly acknowledged and differs from the approach of other higher, especially constitutional courts, more in degree than in kind. It nevertheless leaves the Court considerable discretion in determining the relative weight and ranking of the various interpretative criteria from one case to another. The Court's exercise of its discretion is best understood in terms of the constraints imposed by the accepted justificatory discourse and certain extra-legal steadying factors of legal reasoning, which include a range of political factors such as sensitivity to Member States' interests, political fashion and deference to the 'EU legislator'. In conclusion, the Court of Justice of the EU has used the flexibility inherent in its interpretative approach and the choice it usually enjoys in determining the relative weight and order of the interpretative criteria at its disposal, to resolve legal uncertainty in the EU primary legal materials in a broadly communautaire fashion subject, however, to i) regard to the political, constitutional and budgetary sensitivities of Member States, ii) depending on the constraints and extent of interpretative manoeuvre afforded by the degree of linguistic vagueness of the provisions in question, the relative status of and degree of potential conflict between the applicable norms, and the range and clarity of the interpretative topoi available to resolve first-order legal uncertainty, and, finally, iii) bearing in mind the largely unpredictable personal element in all adjudication. Only in exceptional cases which the Court perceives to go to the heart of the integration process and threaten its acquis communautaire, is the Court of Justice likely not to feel constrained by either the wording of the norms in issue or by the ordinary conventions of interpretative argumentation, and to adopt a strongly communautaire position, if need be in disregard of what the written laws says but subject to the proviso that the Court is assured of the express or tacit approval or acquiescence of national governments and courts.

Comparative Legal Reasoning and European Law deals with the use of comparative law in European legal adjudication. It describes the different forms of the use of comparative law in legal reasoning, argumentation and justification in several national legal orders and in European level legal institutions. The book begins with an inquiry into the nature of comparative law as a legal source. After the description of the empirical study it ends to the general theory of European law and several hard cases of European law are examined. The book is intended for students and researchers in European law but it also contains aspects to be taken into account in the practical work in European legal orders and legal institutions by judges and legal practitioners.

This collection of essays originated in a series of seminars given at the summer courses of the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute, Florence in 1999.

How can multilingualism and legal certainty be reconciled in EU law? Despite the importance of multilingualism for the European project, it has attracted only limited attention from legal scholars. This book provides a valuable contribution to this otherwise neglected area. Whilst firmly situated within the field of EU law, the book also employs theories developed in linguistics and translation studies. More particularly, it explores the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of multilingual EU law and the impact of multilingualism on judicial reasoning at the European Court of Justice. To reconceptualize legal certainty in EU law, the book highlights the importance of transparent judicial reasoning and dialogue between courts and suggests a discursive model for adjudication at the European Court of Justice. Based on both theory and case law analysis, this interdisciplinary study is an important contribution to the field of European legal reasoning and to the study of multilingualism within EU legal scholarship.

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.