Legislative aims and the Kantian supranational court: A comment on Alec Stone Sweet and Clare Ryan, A Cosmopolitan Legal Order

Abstract

AbstractIn my short comment on the new book by Alec Stone Sweet and Clare Ryan, I claim that the European Court of Human Rights does not take the ‘legitimacy of state goals’ step in its proportionality analysis seriously enough, relegating all its hard intellectual work to the next step: necessity scrutiny. What is puzzling about Stone Sweet and Ryan’s book is that this observation about the ECtHR hardly registered in the book’s argument, even though a Kantian perspective seems to be quite hospitable to a consideration of the scarcity of goal scrutiny in ECtHR case law.