Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC The Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU by Gunnar Beck
The Court of Justice 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 Courts jurisprudence over more than half a century? This two part book 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 against this theoretical framework. The author demonstrates that the Courts 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 only in degree but nevertheless leaves the Court considerable discretion which it has exercised in a broadly integrationist direction. The Courts reasoning however must be seen in the context of the special features of EU primary and secondary law and it remains within the bounds both of the accepted standards of legal argumentation and subject to the constraints of certain extra-legal steadying factors of legal reasoning such as sensitivity to Member States interests political fashion and deference to the EU legislator.