Concluding Remarks and an Invitation
| DOI | 10.1177/1023263X1402100413 |
| Author | Monica Claes |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Legal Debate |
790 21 MJ 4 (2014)
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND AN INVITATION
M C*
e days that the Cour t of Justice (CJEU) could shape European Union law and de ne the
direction of European integration, ‘tucked away in the fai ry-tale Duchy of Luxembourg
and blessed (…) with benign neglect by the powers that b e and the mass media (…)’1 are
over. e f unctioning of the Court of Justice, its ‘numeric al performance’ or quantitative
output, the qualit y of its legal reasoning, its methods of interpret ation and its interaction
with the inst itutions and the Member States are a permanent object of academic interest.
And so they should: like ot her highest courts , the Court of Justice is and shou ld be sensitive
to the professional criticism voiced by t he EU law community or EU law communities.2
Individual decisions of t he Court are commented on and critiqued in legal journa ls, and
are no longer simply presented as ‘the inevitable work ing out of the correct implications
of the constitutional text’.3 e Court’s interpretative choices and their implications
for European and national policies are scrutinized and contextualized.4 Beyond the
individual ca ses, the funct ioning of the Court, a nd its role in European integration is
an evergreen in legal scholarship and political science, and more recently, historians
have also begun to study t he Court.5 Endless proposals for reform have been formulated
over the years to tackle the backlog, push the Court to adapt its judicial style and be
* Monica Claes is Profe ssor of European and Compa rative Constitut ional Law at Maastricht Uni versity.
1 E. Stein, ‘Law yers, Judges, and the Makin g of a Tran snational Constitution’, 75 American Jour nal of
International Law (1981), p.1–20.
2 Recent collect ive work on the CJEU in the Englis h language includes M. Dawson , B. De Witte and E.
Muir (eds.), Ju dicial Activism a nd the European Cour t of Justice (Edward E lgar, 2013); M. Adams et
al.(eds.), Judging Europe’s Judge s. e Legitimac y of the Case Law of the Europe an Court of Justice (Ha rt
Publishing, 2013).
3 See Marti n Shapiro’s famous critique of European schola rship on the CJEU case law in M. Shapiro,
‘Comparative Law a nd Comparative Politics’, 53 S. Cal.L. Rev. (1979–80), p.537; recent work on the
reasoning of the C ourt G. Beck, e L egal Reasoning of the Cour t of Justice of the EU (Hart P ublishing,
2012); G. Conway, e Limits of Legal Reason ing and the European Cour t of Justice (CUP, 2012); E.
Paunio, Lega l Certainty in Multilingual EU L aw. Language, Discourse and Re asoning at the European
Court of Just ice (Ashgate, 2013); and S. Sankar i, European Court of Justic e Legal Reasoning in Conte xt
(Europa Law Publish ing, 2013).
4 To name but a few among many others: S . Garben, ‘Sky-high cont roversy and high- yi ng claims? e
Sturgeon case l aw in light of judicial activ ism, Euroscepticism and Eu rolegalism’, 50 CMLRev (2013),
p.15–46; N. Nic Shuibh ne, ‘Seven Questions for Seve n Paragraphs’, 36 ELR (2011), p.161.
5 See for example, B. D avies et al., ‘Towards a New H istory of Europea n Law’, 21 Contemporary European
History (2012), p.3.
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