C. Contartese’s article on “The autonomy of the EU legal order in the ECJ’s external relations case law” has been released

The ELGS resident lecturer, Cristina Contartese, has published this December an article on
‘The autonomy of the EU legal order in the ECJ’s external relations case law: From the “essential” to the “specific characteristics” of the Union and back again’ included in Kluwer’s Common Market Law Review (vol 54 of 2017). The article can be found online here. The purpose of this article is to shed light on its elements through a close examination of the expressions that accompany the notion of “autonomy” in the ECJ’s case law, such as “very foundations”, “very nature”, “essential characteristics” and “specific characteristics” of the EU and EU law. It will be shown that autonomy is closely intertwined with the notions of “essential characteristics” and the “very foundations” of the EU legal order and that, accordingly, only an impact on those elements undermines its autonomy. Nevertheless, in Opinion 2/13, the Court applied such a broad interpretation of its previous case law on autonomy as to leave unsettled the identification of its limits. Autonomy still remains, in sum, partially “nebulous”.