The manifest inapplicability standard: the puzzling story of the Dzodzi jurisprudence
Year: 2008
Type: preprint
Abstract: In applying Article 234 of the EC Treaty the European Court of Justice has been faced with a recurring problem: What to do with requests from national courts for a preliminary ruling on disputes that fall clearly outside the scope of Community law, but to which Community rules were made more or less applicable by national law. As first demonstrated in Thomasdunger, and then later, in a more reasoned judgment of Dzodzi, the Court assumed jurisdiction over preliminary references in such instances. The Court has followed the central principle of these decisions in a long line of cases in the last twenty years in spite of the fact that the line of Advocates General who have, with considerable force, opposed this approach, has been also long. The author does not intend to make general objections to, or provide support for, the Dzodzi jurisprudence. The opinions and arguments of the Advocates General are well-known, and many commentators have taken sides on the issue. Instead, the paper offers analysis on consistency of this case-law, identifying four different standards by which the Court has assessed the admissibility of references in such cases. The author explores the distance the Court has made from the plain reference test set out in Dzodzi to the useful answer doctrine established in Guimont, having a look at some recent cases, as well.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: László Blutman
Institution: University of Szeged
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2261383000