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‘Re‐reading’ Dassonville: Meaning and Understanding in the History of European Law

Schutze, Robert

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Authors



Abstract

There are few ‘mythical’ judgments that every student of European integration has read or ought to have read. Dassonville is one of these judgments. The Court here makes one of its ‘most famous pronouncement[s] ever’; and yet very little historical research on where the Dassonville formula came from and what it was intended to mean in 1974 has yet been undertaken. The conventional wisdom holds that the Court offered a hyper‐liberalist definition of the European internal market, which radically dissociated itself from the conceptual shackles accepted in modern international trade law. According to this view, Dassonville represents the substantive law equivalent of Van Gend en Loos. This traditional view, it will be argued, is simply not borne out by the historical facts. A contextual interpretation indeed shows a very different meaning of Dassonville; and a closer author‐centric analysis reveals a very different understanding of the Dassonville formula in its historical context.

Citation

Schutze, R. (2018). ‘Re‐reading’ Dassonville: Meaning and Understanding in the History of European Law. European Law Journal: Review of European Law in Context, 24(6), 376-407. https://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12290

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 13, 2018
Online Publication Date Aug 24, 2018
Publication Date Nov 1, 2018
Deposit Date Jul 17, 2018
Publicly Available Date Aug 24, 2020
Journal European Law Journal
Print ISSN 1351-5993
Electronic ISSN 1468-0386
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 24
Issue 6
Pages 376-407
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12290

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Copyright Statement
This is the accepted version of the following article: Schutze, Robert (2018). ‘Re‐reading’ Dassonville: Meaning and Understanding in the History of European Law. European Law Journal 24(6): 376-407, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12290. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.





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