Gunnar Beck

Gunnar Beck read politics, ph[1]ilosophy, law and economics in Germany and Great Britain and completed his doctorate in political and legal philosophy under the supervision of Professor Sir Isaiah Berlin in 1996 at Nuffield College, Oxford. He qualified as a barrister of the Inner Temple in 2000 and subsequently worked for the international law firm Herbert Smith and as Deputy Legal Adviser (EU law) at the House of Commons of the United Kingdom Parliament. He currently combines academic work with legal practice as an EU lawyer. He specialises in EU law and has been teaching EU law at SOAS, University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies) since 2005. He previously taught EU law, political philosophy and international relations at Oxford University and the LSE.

In his 2013 study entitled The Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU[2] Beck argues that The ECJ was established at the same time as the EU (then the European Economic Community) to settle disputes between the EU’s institutions and its member states and to provide authoritative guidance on the interpretation of the EU Treaties and EU legislation. It has never discharged that function impartially. From the early 1960s it developed a range of principles, such as those of the uniform application and effectiveness of EU law which it then expanded into the general principles of the supremacy and direct effect of EU law over national law. None of these judge-made principles had any basis in the EU Treaties until 2009 when they were included in the Lisbon Treaty as a leftover from the failed EU Constitution drafted by former French president Giscard d’Estaing. The principle of the primacy of EU law is a judicial creation which was recently codified because once a judge-made rule has been applied again and again by the courts and it suits the integrationist agenda of most member states, no one objects to its formal recognition. The general principles of treaty interpretation are laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Laws of Treaties (“VCLT”). Article 31 VCLT assigns a primary importance in treaty interpretation to the ‘ordinary meaning’ of words. It states that treaties shall be interpreted in ‘good faith’ and that their terms should mean what they say unless, according to Art. 32 VCLT, the meaning is ‘ambiguous or obscure.’ The EU is not a signatory to the VCLT (although its member states are) and the ECJ has never regarded itself as bound by its terms. In interpreting EU law the ECJ does not therefore accord the same primacy to the ordinary meaning of words as many other supranational courts including the International Court of Justice or the WTO Appellate Body. Instead the ECJ adopts a flexible approach which allows it to depart from the wording of the EU Treaties or legislation in favour of a teleological, i.e. purposive, interpretation even where the wording of the relevant provision is neither obscure nor ambiguous. Purposive interpretations generally give courts far greater interpretative room for manoeuvre than text-based interpretation. The problem with purposive interpretations of law is that courts, and the ECJ more so than any other, do not confine themselves to purposes written into the documents they are asked to interpret. Depending on one’s perspective, rules may be viewed as serving many different purposes on which the parties do not necessarily agree. Purposes may also conflict with one another, be stated at different levels of abstraction and be either short-term or long-term. Drawing inspiration from its own distinctively integrationist vision of ‘ever closer union’ between the EU’s members, to which the court also refers as the ‘spirit’, i.e. a kind of political holy ghost, of the Treaties, the court has used the purposive approach consistently to resolve legal disputes concerning the distribution of powers between the EU and members in a pro-integrationist manner. In this manner, the court has over time and without reference to the Treaties substantially extended the scope of EU law and established its own judicial oversight over many areas of national law. It has usually done so in the absence of Treaty authority and not infrequently in a departure from clear language in the Treaties or EU legislation. The ECJ was set up to act as an arbiter between the EU and its members but it has never been a real arbiter who applies agreed rules impartially. Instead, it has been a motor of European integration. In theory the powers of the EU are limited by the principle of conferral (Articles 4 and 5 TEU). According to the principle of conferral the EU may only legislate or act in areas where the member states have expressly authorised it to do so. In line with its general interpretative principle in dubio pro communitate the ECJ has effectively neutralised the principle of conferral by introducing the doctrine of implied powers, by consistently adopting an expansive meaning of the conferred powers and by resolving conflicts in overlapping areas of EU and national competences in favour of the scope of EU law. As a result, the scope of EU law is incrementally expanding from one judicial decision to the next.[3]

Beck was a candidate of the German party Alternative für Deutschland for the European Parliamentary Election of 2019. He was elected to the European Parliament in 2019.[4] Upon his election, Beck was nominated and appointed as one of the coordinators for the ECON committee in the European Parliament. He is also a member of the Working Group on the Conference on the Future of Europe.

• Beck, Gunnar (2013). The Legal Reasoning of the Court of Justice of the EU. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
• Beck, Gunnar (2008). Fichte and Kant on Freedom, Rights and Law. Lexington Books.

• "The Lisbon Treaty & the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: How they will change the EU". (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Speaker Series, London, England)
• Website of The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London