The Foundational Vocabulary of EU law

• Department of Law

The European Union Law Working Group hosts a presentation with Jacobus Van De Beeten (Max Weber Fellow, EUI) and Barend van Leeuwen (Durham University).

Speaker's presentation:

In this presentation I will give an account of what I call the ‘foundational vocabularies’ of EU law. By this I mean various foundational principles that have been invoked to justify the authority of EU law as well as it’s consitutional nature. My argument is that such claims, found in the case law of the Court of Justice and the works of EU legal scholars, alternatively locate the foundations of the EU legal order in the objectives the EU pursues (telos); the fundamental rights or common values on which the EU is founded (ethos) or the systemic nature of the EU legal order (system). By bringing into view the various iterations of EU law’s immanent foundations, I chart the way in which the Court and legal scholars have constructed the EU legal order in a rather circular and self-referential fashion. In doing so, my primary purpose is to reveal a pattern of systemic justification in EU legal discourse. This systemic vocabulary locates the foundations of EU law in a set of unwritten principles that are not found in the written text of the Treaties, but instead are derived from the inherent system of the law. The chapter on which this presentation will be based* thus draws attention to the role of the ‘system’ as a source of unwritten legal principles and thereby paves the way for a deeper exploration of EU law’s ‘systemic’ character.

The draft chapter on which this presentation is based will be shared with the registered participants shortly before the event.