Constitutional Conflict as Judicial Civil Disobedience and Conscientious Objection

Eva Rom focuses on the primacy of Union law, its properties, its justification, and - most delicately and most decisively of all - its limits. The Court of Justice of the European Union and some national constitutional courts have different understandings of where the primacy of Union law over national law finds its limits and whose task it is to define these limits. The consequence in certain cases is constitutional conflict. In the literature of Union law, one finds scholars drawing upon civil disobedience and conscientious objection to enrich the study of constitutional conflict, but this has not yet been done in an exhaustive, theoretically detailed manner. Eva Rom intends to remedy that. The literature on civil disobedience and conscientious objection contains important insights which can be drawn upon to build a framework with which to assess cases of constitutional conflict in the European Union. Civil disobedience and conscientious objection as concepts describing a qualified form of resistance will prove highly valuable to study in order to arrive at an analytically sharper understanding of constitutional conflict. The two concepts will not be used to formulaically defend breaches of Union law. The aim is not to provide for an apologetic endorsement of breaking the law. Instead, this project is aimed at moderation, differentiation, and at pondering the following question: Under what exact conditions could an opposing ruling by a national constitutional court be considered justified and what would the consequences of such a classification as justified be?