Emergency in the Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the European Union

Abstract

This article assesses how the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) engages with emergency argumentation, understood as legal argumentation that seeks to justify a particular application or interpretation of the law on the basis of the exceptionality of an emergency scenario, typically by means of a vocabulary that emphasises necessity and urgency. To this end, the contribution analyses three lines of emergency argumentation and how they impact the legal reasoning of the Court in various cases belonging to different areas of European Union (EU) law. Ultimately, with its conclusions, the article seeks to enhance predictability as to the likelihood of success of emergency argumentation before the Court.