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The Court’s Role in Processes of European Integration

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Book cover Precedents and Judicial Politics in EU Immigration Law

Part of the book series: European Administrative Governance ((EAGOV))

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Abstract

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of prior political science works on the CJEU’s role and autonomy. The chapter traces these works from their origins in 1980s contextualist legal literature, over their meta-theoretical phases during the 1990s, up onto the most recent writings. Whilst debates on the CJEU’s role have been declared ‘closed’ or ‘resolved’ at various stages over this long time period, claims and counter-claims on the interpretative leeway the Court enjoys relative to the EU Member States continue to claim the attention of the field. The chapter’s concluding section retraces the different sets of hindrances of both a theoretical and methodological nature that account for the striking perseverance of these academic divides. The findings on these theoretical and methodological hindrances constitute the background against which, in the chapter’s final section, the theoretical perspectives and methodological strategies of the present study are presented in detail.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Remarkably, even within intergovernmentalist circles, Garrett’s state-centred account of the CJEU’s role was not unequivocally supported. Moravcsik, one of the leading exponents of intergovernmentalist theory at the time, for instance conceded that the CJEU represented an “anomaly” for his functional explanation of national governments’ delegation of power to the supranational level. He instead accepted—with reference to Mattli and Burley’s work—that the Court’s decisions transcended what was foreseen and desired by most national governments (Moravcsik, 1993, pp. 513–514).

  2. 2.

    Note that, the other way around, interdisciplinary legal works engaging with political science have also been met with charges of, for instance, not fully considering the “theoretical spectrum on offer in the field of political science” (Joerges, 1996, p. 108), or of treating these “as a residual category that only comes into play where law and legal reasoning fall short” leading to “an impoverished view of the role of politics in legal decision-making” (Alter et al., 2002, p. 117).

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    1. University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

      Marie De Somer

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    De Somer, M. (2019). The Court’s Role in Processes of European Integration. In: Precedents and Judicial Politics in EU Immigration Law. European Administrative Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93982-7_2

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