The new edited volume The Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU: A Normative Assessment by Alezini Loxa and Luigi Lonardo aims to enrich the study of the Court of Justice of the EU by providing normative—as opposed to descriptive—assessments of its legal reasoning.
Taking as a starting point a descriptive account of the Court’s adjudicative practice, which informs a shared conceptual basis from which the various contributions move, the volume offers a diverse collection of normative assessments of the CJEU’s reasoning. Specifically, it offers contributions looking both at the Court through an abstract, horizontal lens, that is, by focusing on techniques of adjudication across various policy-areas, and at specific areas of case law, proposing alternative interpretations based on different theoretical frameworks.
While scholars have assessed the reasoning of the Court from specific perspectives (constitutional, democratic, social) or have endorsed the approach the Court follows, no conclusive work has ever combined both an abstract theoretical lens and an in-depth dive into specific areas of EU law, while at the same time maintaining strong conceptual unity. The various contributions highlight how complex, and necessarily pluralistic, a normative assessment of the Court must be. While the volume does not claim to provide a final answer to the question of what a ‘good’ judgment is, it develops assessments that rigorously engage with the text of a judicial decision based on openly acknowledged normative assumptions and theoretical grounding, specific criteria, and a shared understanding of the constraints under which the Court operates.
The edited volume is the outcome of a workshop ' held at Lund University in April 2024 with the kind support of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University and the Centre for European Integration at University College Cork.
The book is available open access: Link to the book at OUP