A groundbreaking study of the Court of Justice of the European Union, examining what the Court decides and how it justifies its decisions. Written by leading scholars, the book blends theoretical insights with case-specific analysis to evaluate the quality of the Court's legal reasoning.
This edited volume offers a groundbreaking contribution to the study of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) by shifting the focus from descriptive accounts of its jurisprudence to normative evaluations of its legal reasoning. Building on a shared conceptual foundation derived from the Court's adjudicative practices, the book brings together a diverse array of scholarly perspectives that critically assess the CJEU's reasoning both in abstract terms and within specific doctrinal contexts.
The volume is structured around two complementary approaches: one that examines the Court's techniques of adjudication across policy areas through a horizontal, theoretical lens, and another that engages deeply with specific aspects of case law, offering alternative interpretations grounded in distinct normative frameworks. This dual structure enables a rich and pluralistic exploration of what constitutes sound judicial reasoning in the EU legal order.
Unlike previous scholarship that has either endorsed the Court's approach or critiqued it from isolated perspectives-constitutional, democratic, or social-this volume uniquely integrates theoretical abstraction with doctrinal specificity, all while maintaining a coherent conceptual unity. The contributors rigorously engage with the text of judicial decisions, articulating their assessments through clearly stated normative assumptions, theoretical grounding, and an appreciation of the institutional constraints under which the Court operates. While The Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU does not seek to define a singular model of a 'good' judgment, it advances the debate by offering methodologically robust and normatively transparent analyses.
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1: Alezini Loxa and Luigi Lonardo: Introduction: Rationale and Criteria
for a Normative Assessment of the Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the
EU
Part I. A Question of Paradigm?
2: Joxerramon Bengoetxea andLuigi Lonardo: Quality of the Judgments of the
Court of Justice: Coherence, Efficiency, and the Context of Explanation
3: Dorota Leczykiewicz: Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU:
Challenging the Interpretation Framework
Part II. Normative Indeterminacy and Justificatory Premises
4: Emily Hancox: A Normative Case for the Principle of Lex Specialis in EU
Law
5: Luke Dimitrios Spieker: Primary Law as Pyramid: The Case for Substantive
Hierarchies in EU Primary Law
6: Davor Petri'c: Between Values and Self-Preservation in the Interpretation
of EU Law
7: Luigi Lonardo: An Assessment of the Reasoning by Implied Hierarchy in the
Case Law of the Court of Justice in Common Foreign and Security Policy
Part III. Formal Logic and Consistency
8: Emiliya Bratanova van Harten: The Road Not Taken: Applying the EU Charter
of Fundamental Rights to Migration and Asylum Cases
9: Alezini Loxa: Insiders, Outsiders, and the Limits of Analogous
Interpretation in the ECJ Case Law
10: Annegret Engel: The CJEU's Centre of Gravity Theory in Legal Basis
Litigation: A Flawed Concept
11: Menelaos Markakis: The Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the
European Union in the Area of Economic and Monetary Union: A Normative
Assessment
Part IV. Procedural Fairness and Internal Processes
12: Niamh Nic Shuibhne: How Does the Court of Justice Deal with Its Own
Previous Case Law in the Field of Union Citizenship? Assessing and Refining
Methods of Communicative Reasoning
13: Alexandros Politis: The Omnipotent Legislature in the Interpretation of
Primary Law by the Court of Justice in the Fields of EU Citizenship and
Direct Taxation
14: Graham Butler: Deciding Not to Decide: Dismissal, Narrowing, and
Relinquishment at the Court of Justice of the European Union
15: Nathan Cambien: The Different Institutional Roles of the General Court
and the Court of Justice and their Impact on the CJEU's Reasoning in the
Field of EU Competition Law
16: Alezini Loxa: Conclusion: On the Horizon of Possibilities for Normative
Assessments
Alezini Loxa is a 2025-2026 Emile Noël Fellow at NYU and a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in EU law at Lund University, Sweden. She is the managing editor of the Nordic Journal of European Law and a board member of the European Law Moot Court Society. She has published widely in the field of migration law and EU social rights, and she is the author of the monograph Sustainability and EU Migration Law: Tracing the History of a Contemporary Concept (Cambridge University Press 2025). At Lund University, she has been teaching courses on EU Constitutional Law and European Fundamental Rights.
Luigi Lonardo is a Lecturer in EU law at University College Cork and adjunct faculty at Sciences Po Paris. His areas of expertise and research are the law and politics of EU foreign policy, as well as EU constitutional law more broadly. He is the author of two monographs, EU Common Foreign and Security Policy after Lisbon: Between Law and Geopolitics (Springer 2022) and Russia's 2022 War against Ukraine and the Foreign Policy Reaction of the EU: Context, Diplomacy, Law (Palgrave 2023).
