ABSTRACT
The European Union legal order cannot be properly understood without addressing the constitutional and constitutive role of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Since its foundation in 1952, the Court of Justice has become a synonym of judicial creativity aiming at construing legitimacy both of the new legal order and of its own. Precedents and case-based reasoning shaped in the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union perform thus a role of a constantly evolving judicial substratum consolidating the meaning and depth of the European integration. Through meticulous construction of coherent lines of case law, the Court of Justice has laid the constitutional foundations of the European Union and its axiology. This unique model of jurisprudence, which has been designated by legal scholars as a “stone-by-stone” reasoning, is an expression of the unique nature of EU law and also constitutes the crucial element in the Court’s method of conducting a judicial discourse. The present contribution attempts to explore the role of case-based reasoning in the practice of the Court of Justice driven by the ultimate objective of ensuring the unity and coherence of EU law.
