University of Bologna Law Review

The Court of Justice of the E.U.: A Contextualist Court

2023-11-20T22:24:35+01:00

The Court of Justice of the European Union (E.U.) is sometimes labelled “a teleological court”. In this paper I will show why it is a misleading label. Then I will propose a more appropriate label for it – “a contextualist court” – and describe what such a label reveals about the interpretation of E.U. law by the Court of Justice. In particular, I will show that the contextual/systemic arguments are the most defining feature of the Court’s legal reasoning and that those arguments are essential for the Court’s use of other categories of interpretive arguments: textual/linguistic, purposive/teleological, and historical/intentional. I will also discuss what are the values promoted by such an approach to the interpretation of E.U. law. In the end, I will demonstrate, using a recent case study, that the Court’s interpretive approach leads to integrationist outcomes less often than is usually thought. This challenges accounts built on the alleged integrationist bias of the Court of Justice, which is often used interchangeably with the label “teleological”.

Contract Law and Public Justification

2023-12-06T23:13:40+01:00

In Justice in Transactions and elsewhere, Peter Benson presents his theory of contract law, “contract as a transfer of ownership”, as being capable of providing a public basis of justification for court decisions on contracts. In this article, I argue that Benson’s theory of public justification of judicial decisions is a sort of consensus theory according to which public justification requires reasons shared by the justificatory constituency or members of the public. In Benson’s case, certain reasons are taken as shared because they are constitutive of the practice of contract law. One of the main theses of the article is that, for Benson’s theory of public justification to hold, the public justification must be composed only of those citizens for whom the practice of contract law as a whole is legitimate. The exclusion of other citizens (that is, those who regard contract law as illegitimate), however, does no greater damage to Benson’s theory. In addition, I also argue that considerations about the public justification of judicial decisions do little to defend the thesis that contract as a transfer of ownership is the best interpretive theory of contract law.

Origins of the Sino-American Trade War: A Case Study of Three Shakespearean Proverbs on Expectations

2023-10-23T19:04:15+02:00