Need we kill to dissect? Attempt at a contextual approach to the EU economic freedoms

Thesis

A different type of polity requires a different type of constitution; more importantly, it also requires a different way of thinking, a new constitutionalism able to address the relevant descriptive and normative questions facing this new political entity. This thesis tries to contribute to the development of EU constitutionalism by focusing on the interplay between the different normative concerns behind the EU’s market freedoms identified in traditional legal discourse – as results mainly from court decisions and academic discussions –, and the institutional environment which mediates the freedoms’ application. It is hypothesised that such interplay can be better understood by reference to the findings of some disciplines ‘external’ to internal legal discourses such as economics, philosophy, or political science. Normatively, it is hoped that debates concerning the market freedoms that take into account ‘external elements’ will be more attractive to the legal community than those that do not include such considerations. Descriptively, it is submitted that the incorporation of insights arising from these ‘external’ disciplines into the traditional modes of discourse and analysis on the EU market freedoms – in effect, the internalisation of these ‘external’ elements – can provide better descriptive fits of the law and its development than theories that do not take them into account. An incidental result of this approach is that by the end of this thesis a theory of the market freedoms will have been sketched: by combining ‘internal’ and ‘external’ elements, an analytical framework can be developed that is able to make descriptive sense, formally and substantively, of free movement law at both its most general – where formal common structures seem to be undeniable, and a minimum common substantive content can be found –, and at its most detailed levels – where substantive variations and greater normative specification seem to exist.

Authors: Caro de Sousa, P; Pedro Caro de Sousa

• Publication date: 2014
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: EU law; Free Movement; Constitutional Law; Rights Theory; Intercontextuality
• Subjects: EU Law