Book Review: Limits to EU Powers. A Case Study of EU Regulatory Criminal Law
| Author | Claudio Matera |
| DOI | 10.1177/2032284419857509 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
Book Reviews
Limits to EU Powers. A Case Study of EU Regulatory Criminal Law, Jacob O
¨berg (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2017),
ISBN 9781509903351, 256 pp., £ 70
Reviewed by:Claudio Matera, University of Twente, The Netherlands
DOI: 10.1177/2032284419857509
At the root of any policy and normative choice in the European Union (EU) reside questions over
competences, the scope of attributed powers, and legitimacy. While the economic and financial
crisis has placed economic and social policies under the spotlight, the book under review is
dedicated to the policy that remains one of the thorniest domains for the EU integration process:
criminal law. Jacob O
¨berg has written a detailed book breaking down the way in which the exercise
of EU criminal powers has been and should be monitored and assessed. The author unequivocally
highlights the numerous shortcomings of both practice and academic debate and puts forward a
number of new approaches that the EU Court of Justice and scholars could use to analyse the
exercise of powers in the Union.
The book is structured in a clear manner. After an introduction in which the topic and research
questions are advanced, the book is divided in two main parts: one is dedicated to the limits
applicable to the exercise of EU competences in general, and the second part examines EU
regulatory criminal law – the second paragraph of Article 83 of the Treaty of the Functioning
of the European Union (TFEU) in which the EU is given a broad mandate to adopt Directives
containing minimum rules with regard to the definition of criminal offences and sanctions. The
choice of regulatory criminal law, or Article 83(2) TFEU, is not accidental: this provision is linked,
both in terms of syntax and substance, to two provisions that have been at the core of the
competence creep debate, that is, Articles 114 and 352 TFEU.
Part 1 of the book is dedicated to the analysis of the three key principles that, within the EU legal
order, provide mechanisms to monitor the legitimate exercise of EU competences and the legit-
imate adoption of EU measures: conferral, proportionality and subsidiarity. Three main arguments
emerge from the analysis conducted by the author in part 1. First, the author further explains the
argument according to which proportionality is not a tool to assess competence disputes. After all,
proportionality is about determining the latitude of a specific measure rather than the existence or
scope of an EU competence. Secondly, focusing on the reach of Article 114 TFEU, the author
argues that the Court of Justice has failed to properly, thoroughly and consistently address ques-
tions of legitimacy linked to the scope and the limits of EU powers. Of particular interest in this
regard are the proposed mechanisms through which, according to O
¨berg, the Court of Justice could
motu proprio perform a thorough analysis of the preambles of legislative measures and demand EU
lawmakers to demonstrate the requirement of a given measure with evidence. Finally, in the last
New Journal of European Criminal Law
2019, Vol. 10(3) 313–317
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
njecl.sagepub.com
NJECL
NJECL
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