Conflict of norms in European Union law and the legal reasoning of the European Court of Justice

Abstract

This thesis examines the topic of conflict of norms in European Union (EU) law and the legal reasoning of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), arguing that the framework of conflict of norms provides conceptual insight into justification and the role of value choices in legal reasoning. After examining the theory of conflict of norms, which seems to have been relatively under-studied generally and especially in EU law, it examines three particular aspects of norm conflict resolution in the legal reasoning of the ECJ and EU law: conflict of interpretative norms, especially the opposition between conserving and innovative interpretation; conflicts of human rights norms, looking in particular at the idea of a hierarchy of rights and of specificationism in the articulation of rights; and conflicts of competence norms. It concludes that the scope exists for a fuller justification of the choice of norms in the legal reasoning of the ECJ and generally in EU law and offers a perspective on how the values articulated by the EU suggest particular approaches to norm conflict resolution by the ECJ in its decision-making in these fields, in particular, a greater resort to lex specialis and originalist or historical interpretation, in contrast to its current method.