Le juge et le travail des concepts juridiques : le cas de la citoyenneté de l'Union européenne

Abstract

By introducing the terms “citizens of the Union”, the drafters of the Maastricht Treaty inscribed a new concept in European Union law. The denomination of the new concept coincides with that of national legal concepts and of a concept widely discussed in political theory. More than twenty years later, the legal concept of citizenship of the Union has been widely constructed by the case law of the European Court of Justice. This case law then offers a particularly rich field of study for the development of a new perspective on judicial activity. My thesis proposes an investigation on the judge and the work of legal concepts; that is, an investigation on the practice of the judge – the work on concepts – and on the role of concepts in legal reasoning – the concepts at work. This inquiry should be distinguished from classical studies on the judge, mainly dealing with interpretation, as well as from works focusing on power relations between legal actors. In this thesis, I argue that EU law must be understood in its own terms, through an inquiry on the conceptual practices of the judge and I propose a non-formalist account of legal forms.