Justin Lindeboom

Justin Lindeboom studied law and history at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and took an LLM degree from University College London. He read for a PhD in law at the University of Groningen under the supervision of Prof. Laurence Gormley and Prof. Dimitry Kochenov. His research focuses on constitutional law, philosophy of law, EU and global competition law, and EU internal market law. Justin has held visiting fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and International Law in Heidelberg, the European University Institute in Florence, and University College London. He is also Fellow at the Centre for Law, Economics and Society at University College London. He is the co-editor of The Quality of Nationality Index (with Dimitry Kochenov, Hart Publishing 2019) and The Internal Market and the Future of European Integration (with Fabian Amtenbrink, Gareth Davies and Dimitry Kochenov, Cambridge University Press 2019).

Research Project

Kirchberg’s Fairy Tale of Analytical Jurisprudence: Implications and Limitations of Conceptualizing EU Law as an Autonomous Legal System. This project aims to flesh out the claims of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the nature of EU law and the underlying conception of law from the perspective of analytical jurisprudence. Its main hypotheses are that (a) analytical jurisprudence offers a useful vocabulary to explain typical characteristics of the EU legal system, including the claims and behavior of its legal officials, and that (b) the EU legal system behaves no differently from national legal systems. This project is specifically concerned with three well-known puzzles of EU constitutional law: the basis of the doctrines of autonomy, primacy and direct effect; the function of national courts as “decentralized EU courts” in the EU legal system; and the relationship between the autonomous nature of the EU legal system and the hermeneutics of the ECJ case law. It aims to show that analytical jurisprudence can offer a different perspective to these puzzles that complements existing views, which mostly root in either constitutional theory and law, or normative jurisprudence. This project will refer mainly to the legal positivist tradition of Kelsen, Hart, Raz, and their followers, but also draw from other perspectives such as Dworkinian non-positivism, legal-sociological systems theory (e.g. Luhmann, Selznick, and Teubner), and Bourdieu’s work on the legal field, so as to provide a richer contextualization of the main insights (and limitations) of analytical jurisprudence. Following post-Popperian methodology, this project will try to develop a conceptualization of EU law in the “research programme” of analytical jurisprudence, but at the same time it will try to falsify precisely such a conceptualization by testing its hard core assumptions. Other, “thick” theories of constitutionalism that have expressly departed from the “a-historical” and “thin” approach of analytical jurisprudence, will be used in this regard to critically scrutinize this project’s main hypotheses.