Does Anything Hang on the Autonomy of EU Law?

• George Letsas ^[1]
  1. [1] University College London

     University College London

     Reino Unido

     
• Localización: European papers: a journal on law and integration, ISSN-e 2499-8249, Vol. 8, Nº. 3, 2023, págs. 1293-1299
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Jurisprudential accounts of the autonomy of EU law have struggled to offer a compelling account of its unique features. Nevertheless, I argue that Ronald Dworkin’s court-centric methodological approach is better-suited than Hartian positivism to shed light on the notion that EU law is autonomous. This is because most questions about the autonomy of EU law, when asked from a positivist perspective, are of little or no practical significance and philosophical inquiry will inevitably be inconclusive. By contrast, the autonomy of EU law is routinely employed as a normative principle helping EU courts to decide the issue of which party should win the case at hand. It is better understood as a shorthand reference to a political requirement, namely that EU courts ought to identify the main values behind European integration and to build – as opposed to find in the extant legal materials – a coherent body of principles.