Letsas, George; (2024) Does Anything Hang on the Autonomy of EU law? European Papers , 8 (3) pp. 1293-1299. 10.15166/2499-8249/719.

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Abstract

Jurisprudential accounts of the autonomy of EU law have struggled to offer a compelling account of its unique features. Nevertheless, I argue that Ronald Dworkin’s court-centric methodological approach is better-suited than Hartian positivism to shed light on the notion that EU law is autonomous. This is because most questions about the autonomy of EU law, when asked from a positivist perspective, are of little or no practical significance and philosophical inquiry will inevitably be inconclusive. By contrast, the autonomy of EU law is routinely employed as a normative principle helping EU courts to decide the issue of which party should win the case at hand. It is better understood as a shorthand reference to a political requirement, namely that EU courts ought to identify the main values behind European integration and to build – as opposed to find in the extant legal materials – a coherent body of principles.

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