Preliminary References and the Workload of the Court of Justice
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Author | Eric Gippini-Fournier |
| DOI | 10.1177/1023263X1402100411 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Legal Debate |
21 MJ 4 (2014) 771
PRELIMINARY REFERENCES AND THE
WORKLOAD OF THE COURT OF JUSTICE
‘Eh Bien, Dansez Maintenant!’
E G-F*
§1. INTRODUCTION: SOME FIGURES1
e ques tion presented to us is whether the Court of Justice ca n deal with the increasing
number of references for a preliminary r uling while preser ving the qua lity of its decisions.
Article 267 TFEU is a unique and crucial piece of the EU legal system and its
importance ca n hardly be overstated. It is clichéd, but no less tr ue, to recall that prac tically
every milestone in t he development of EU law, from Van Ge nd e n L oo s2 and Costa/ENEL3
to Francovich4 or Åkerberg Fransson,5 is the result of a reference for a prelimina ry ruling.
Also in quantitative terms, preliminary rulings have always been a signi cant part
of the Court’s workload. Admittedly, raw numbers are a crude tool to eva luate the
workload. Nevertheless , a bird’s eye view of g ures is useful for our purposes.
Historically, preliminary references have represented 43% of all new cases having
entered the Court since 1953.6 is proportion varies every year and is increasing,
* Member of the Lega l Service , European Com mission; Lect urer, Université de Tours. e views
expressed are p ersonal and may not be attributed to t he European Commission or its Leg al Service.
e author is g rateful to his colleag ues Nicholas Khan and Pie t Van Nu el for t aking the time to re ad
an early dra of this comment. Mis takes and omissions a re the author’s own.
1 Data in this s ection is tak en from the latest a nnual report of t he Court of Justice (Court of Justice
of the European Union , Annual Report 2012 (Publications O ce of the Europea n Union, 2013) and
from the Cour t’s press release of 13March 2014 (CJEU, ‘Statistics conc erning judicial act ivity in 2013:
unprecedented g ure’, Press Release No 31/14 (2014). Percentages and ex trapolations calcu lated by the
author. Other data ha s been obtained from th e search engine of the Cou rt of Justice.
2 Case C-26/62 Van Gend en Loos [1936] ECR 3.
4 Joined Cases C- 6/90 and C-9/90 Francovich [1991] ECR I-5357.
5 Case C-617/10 Åkerberg Fransson, Judgment of 7May 2013, not yet reported.
6 e rst prel iminary reference date s from 1961, under the EEC treaty (Case 13– 61 Bosch [1962] ECR
45). e ECSC Treaty did contemplate a pre liminar y reference mechan ism (Article 41). Although
the wording of Ar ticle41 ECSC only referred to t he validity of acts of t he High Authority, the Court
const rued it s scope a s allo wing a lso refe rences c oncern ing the interpr etatio n of provi sions of the ECS C
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