EU Values, liberal dialogue, and the changing role of the Court of Justice of the EU

Speaker: Prof.Oliver Gerstenberg (UCL Laws)
Chair: Prof. Annabelle Lever (SciencesPo)

About the lecture 

Liberal values have become prominent the recent case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and are becoming the driving force behind the EU’s legal and political discourse. The CJEU insists that these values do not merely function in the sphere of politics but also, as an integral part of the very identity of the European Union as a common legal order, find concrete expression in principles containing legally binding obligations for the Member States. This raises the question of the CJEU’s role. Yet behind this institutional concern lies the further question of how to understand these values themselves. The applied meaning of these values will have to be not too thick, but also not too thin. While the CJEU must not pre-empt reasoned debate over the concretisation of those values where EU citizens (often reasonably) divide (“not too thick”), it must also rule out ethnocentric prejudice and draw red lines (“not too thin”), since value-negation in one part of the EU is felt everywhere in the EU. The lecture, accordingly, explores the institutional and normative conditions of liberal dialogue in the EU also by parsing some of the CJEU’s current caselaw.

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