PhD thesis defence by Greta Spanò.
This thesis examines the interpretation of autonomous concepts of European Union law by the Court of Justice of the European Union and their implementation in national courts. In the multilingual and multicultural context of the European Union, the interpretation of European legal terms may lead to discrepancies with the meanings such terms hold within individual Member States. To solve this tension, the Court of Justice declares the conceptual autonomy of some European terms: in other words, the CJEU interprets them autonomously. By the interpretative technique of autonomous concepts, the CJEU defines and interprets a new terminology specific to the European legal order, which is independent of both national and international meanings.
To determine whether this specific interpretative technique resolves the potential tension with the national significance of legal terms, this research examines the interpretation of autonomous concepts in EU law through the case-law of the Court of Justice and French and Italian courts.
This research will thus examine the creation and interpretation of autonomous terms and concepts in the European legal order and their application in national courts. First, it will investigate the creation of such concepts from a combined legal and linguistic perspective. Secondly, it will investigate the process of resignification of legal terms from the perspective of the legal discourse of the CJEU, and through the evolution of its case-law. In addition, it will analyse the reasoning of French and Italian courts to understand to what extent autonomous concepts are interpreted and applied in national courts. In order to capture this complex phenomenon, which includes legal and linguistic elements, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary, combining law and language. In particular, the case-law of the CJEU and national courts will be studied empirically through the lens of corpus linguistic analysis.
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