Rule of Law as a Tool to Claim Supremacy
RECONNECT Working Paper No. 9, September 2020 (Leuven)
19 Pages Posted: 13 Nov 2020
Date Written: September 24, 2020
Abstract
In this contribution, which embraces a dialogical understanding of the Rule of Law, I focus on the ‘other’ side of the Rule of Law coin in Europe, as opposed to the story of the fight for the values of Article 2 TEU: the deployment of the principle of the Rule of Law by the Court of Justice to pre-empt the necessary dialogue and to disqualify substantive arguments of principle originating in other legal orders. The Rule of Law, on this count and as used by the Court, emerges as a dangerous trump card making impossible the dialogue on which the Rule of Law directly depends. Such use of the principle is both dangerous and directly opposed to the very essence of European constitutionalism, I argue. This work, which has been presented at the Central European University in Budapest in January 2020 and at the University of the Basque Country in San Sebastián in July 2020 further develops the ideas first expressed in ‘EU Law without the Rule of Law’, YEL, 2015.
Keywords: Rule of Law, Dialogue, EU Law, ECJ, Supremacy
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