Statecraft, the Market State and the Development of European Legal Culture
TOWARDS A EUROPEAN LEGAL CULTURE, Genevieve Helleringer & Kai Purnhagen, eds., Beck/Hart/Nomos, 2013, Forthcoming
EUI Working Papers Law 2012/10
28 Pages Posted: 23 Apr 2012 Last revised: 25 Apr 2018
There are 2 versions of this paper
Statecraft, the Market State and the Development of European Legal Culture
Statecraft, the Market State and the Development of European Legal Culture
Date Written: April 20, 2012
Abstract
We consider whether the theory of the market-state can explain the features of a common European legal culture. Our thesis is that there is an extant EU legal culture, one which developed through the Europeanisation of law. The distinct European feature of this legal culture is the enforcement of market-state features in EU law. The concept of legal culture needs to be untied from a communitarian view by which culture “provides this group with its identity by establishing internal coherence and external difference, as well as relative consistency over time”. Culture hence needs to be viewed through a decentralized lens. We will prove our thesis on assorted examples from EU administrative, contract, and competition law. As a nation-state heritage, EU law has developed a legal culture which does not follow purely market-state rationales, but rather balances these rationales against nation-state features such as human rights.
Keywords: Legal Culture, Market-State, Statecraft, EU law, interpretation, legal theory
JEL Classification: K10, K19, K33
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation