61
Second working session — The impact
b. Ensuring legal certainty in a pluralist system
Legal certainty requires to ensure that if two legal orders co-exist only one
legal solution is applicable
in concreto
to solve cases of conflict.
The rule of law demands for a single legal solution in every individual case.
If this cannot be guaranteed, there is no rule of law and therefore no law at
all (
16
). Any meta-rule assumed to do this, however, would imply a monist ap-
proach with some sort of hierarchy, at least for the meta-rule having authority
over the conflicting legal orders. It would, thus, exclude the claim of autonomy
for each of them. The establishment of a constitutional council having juris-
diction at least on the key question of competences (
17
), therefore, would not
be a solution, while concepts like contrapunctual law (
18
), the principle of best
fit (
19
) or of procedural priority (
20
) either face a similar criticism (
21
) or lack
an explanation for why an autonomous legal order should engage into such
methods. Though these approaches indicate a path for practically ensuring
what the rule of law and, thus, legal certainty require, a theoretical framework
is needed for providing these methods with a normative basis without aban-
doning pluralism.
(
16
) The critique of constitutional pluralism by J. Baquero Cruz,
The Legacy of the Maastricht
Urteil and the pluralist Movement,
14 European Law Journal (2008), p. 389, 416 et seq.,
seems to focus on this problem; similarly: P. Eleftheriadis, Pluralism and Integrity 23 Ratio
Juris (2010), p. 365, 377 et seq. 387, 388.
(
17
) J.H.H. Weiler,
The Autonomy of the Community Legal Order – Through the Looking Glass
,
37 Harvard International Law Journal (1996), p. 447; id.,
The Constitution of Europe,
1999,
p. 322, 353 et seq.
(
18
) See Miguel Poires Maduro, Contrapunctual Law: Europe’s Constitutional Pluralism in
Action, in: Neil Walker (ed.), Sovereignty in Transition, 2003., p. 501, 523 et seq.; id., Der
Kontrapunkt im Dienste eines europäischen Verfassungspluralismus, 42 EuR (2007) 3, 22
et seq.
(
19
) Mattias Kumm, The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict: Constitutional Supremacy
in Europe before and after the Constitutional Treaty, 11 ELJ (2005), p. 262, 286 et seq.; see
also id., The Moral Point of Constitutional Pluralism: Defining the domain of legitimate
institutional disobedience and conscientous objection, in: Julie Dickson and Pavlos
Eleftheriades, The Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law (2012), p. 216-246.
(
20
) Anne Peters,
Elemente einer Theorie der Verfassung Europas
, Duncker&Humblot, Berlin
2001, p. 215-220, 255, 284-295.
(
21
) For clarification that the idea of contrapunctual law is non-hierarchical see Miguel Poires
Maduro,
Three Claims of Constitutional Pluralism,
in Avbelj and Komárek, Constitutional
Pluralism (note 13), p. 83.
