[Book Reviews] The Normative Foundations for EU Criminal Justice: Powers, Limits and Justifications, by Jacob Öberg, (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2024)

Abstract

This book constitutes a comprehensive and systemic evaluation of the normative justification of the European Union’s (EU’s) expanding role in the field of criminal law and criminal justice. With the objective of deliberating why the EU should be involved in criminal law and criminal justice, the author poses significant questions about how and why the EU has come to perform its role in EU criminal law. He conducts a robust scrutiny of existing justifications used by the EU legislator to legitimate their action and assesses their application to all dimensions of this area, from criminal justice to substantive criminal law and the agencies’ function. This book is a much-needed, novel, multi-level addition to important literature in the field, at a time when EU criminal law is no longer an emerging policy area but a field where the dust has relatively settled and whose scholar is now expected to take a few steps back and reflect on its rationale. Öberg does exactly this through a meta-analytical lens that spans from theory to application and cuts through from substantive to procedural and institutional aspects of EU criminal law.