Learning from EU Law Stories: The European Court and its Interlocutors Revisited

Abstract

In EU Law Stories, many of the world’s leading scholars of European Union law revisit the landmark cases of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), engaging not only the doctrinal pronouncements of the Court’s magisterial decisions but also and especially the social, political, cultural, and legal contexts of those decisions. These stories, when taken together with recent historical and sociological scholarship on the Court, provide important new insights about the Court and its many interlocutors. In this concluding chapter, I examine the lessons of EU Law Stories with respect to four of the Court’s key interlocutors: (1) litigants and their lawyers, with their diverse and sometimes surprising motivations, tactics and strategies; (2) national judges, whose decisions to submit preliminary references and apply ECJ rulings were by no means preordained; (3) the European Commission as the Union’s integrationist repeat player; and (4) the member governments which weighed in both before the Court and after its judgments. I conclude (5) with a final discussion of the Court itself, which I argue is beginning to yield some insights into its internal workings, yet remains at its most impenetrable precisely with respect to the specific stories that we want to tell about it.