Question
2 ) do you agree or disagree with Steven Weatherill (in: The Road to Ruin: 'Restrictions on use' and the circular lifecycle of Article 34
2) do you agree or disagree with Steven Weatherill (in: The Road to Ruin: 'Restrictions on use' and the circular lifecycle of Article 34 TFEU, (2012) European Journal of Consumer Law Issue 2) when he complains:
- 'The Court's cautious but imprecise insertion of the adjective 'considerable' and the adverb 'greatly' into its definition of the reach of Article 34 aims to capture the notion that just because national laws vary does not of itself mean there is (in short) 'an internal market problem'. The threshold at which divergence becomes a matter of concern for the EU is higher. Keck and Mithouard was equally an attempt to separate out national measures that need to be checked against the requirements of the internal market from those that do not. And it was inspired by the Court's failure to appreciate that its decisions in the Sunday Trading cases represented a step beyond Cassis de Dijon by casting the Article 34 TFEU net wide enough to catch measures that applied equally in law and in fact to all products irrespective of their origin. Shrewd litigants, eager for legal instruments apt to attack restraints on commercial freedom, had pushed the scope of free movement ever wider. From this exorbitant reading of the scope of Article 34, which loaded huge weight on questions of justification for national regulatory choices, the Court chose in Keck to retreat. But realising what the Court was - correctly, wisely - trying to achieve is one thing: finding an apt formula is more difficult. Keck didn't do the perfect job, and the Court has now spent almost twenty years trying to pin down with more precision where Article 34 TFEU stops and where national regulatory autonomy begins. And the cases on 'restrictions on use' give the unsettling impression that the Court may be (almost) right back to where it began'
- explain your views
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