PhD thesis defence by Andrea Peripoli
This dissertation investigates how the Court of Justice of the European Union constructs juridified knowledge about markets when adjudicating labour rights, and asks what this reveals about law’s cognitive capacity to understand socio-economic phenomena. The central finding is that legal discourse faces irreducible cognitive constraints when it processes economic knowledge. In the specific context examined, these constraints produce variable and often incoherent legal representations of ‘the market’. More generally, these constraints limit what law can understand about socio-economic reality, constraining its potential to transform it.
The dissertation engages a strategic impasse between two approaches to protecting labour rights within EU internal market law. Disjunctive approaches argue that labour rights interpretation should be insulated from economic reasoning while integrative approaches propose that legal discourse could internalise theories supporting labour rights’ positive economic function. The dissertation argues that both strategies proceed on unexamined assumptions about law’s cognitive capacity to handle economic ideas.
Analysing the four Advocate General Opinions in Defrenne II, Viking, Laval, and AGET Iraklis, the dissertation first reveals substantial variation in internalised market conceptions, ranging from markets as institutionally incomplete phenomena to natural self-correcting systems where intervention is inherently distortive. Second, systems-theoretical analysis identifies distinct cognitive strategies through which economic knowledge is handled in each Opinion, and shows that attempts at genuine economic engagement tend to produce fragmentation rather than coherent integration. Last, ideal-type analysis shows that the internal coherence of juridified market conceptions is only superficial and is achieved through mechanisms such as proportionality, categorical reduction, selective operationalisation, and textual disappearance.
To explain why these patterns emerge with structural necessity, the dissertation develops a cognitive theory of juridification. Within this framework, legal concepts function as representational devices that are inherently informationally incomplete and sacrifice detail for tractability. These representational limitations are compounded by synchronic and diachronic constraints, such as law’s operational closure on the one hand and mechanisms of path-dependency and legal evolution on the other, constraints which further restrict law’s capacity to retain and develop nuanced understandings of social reality over time. These constraints are not contingent failures that better reasoning could overcome but structural features of legal cognition that constrain what law can understand about social reality — and its capacity to reshape it.
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