Acceso usuarios
Tim Maciejewski, Jens Theilen
Preliminary rulings of the European Court of Justice have an ex tunc effect unless the Court itself specifies otherwise, which it does only in exceptional circumstances. While that approach seems to enhance the uniform and effective application of Union law from a temporal perspective, it sits uneasily with a separate strand of case law concerning the protection of legitimate expectations and legal certainty. In the recent case of Dansk Industri, the Court considered the relationship between these lines of case law, and gave complete priority to the temporal effect of its rulings. We argue that this approach is not only normatively unsatisfactory in and of itself, but also that giving more prominence to the protection of legitimate expectations would permit the Court to take more nuanced views on controversial matters in substance.
