Publication

EU Values and the Demise of Constitutional Prudence

In April 2026, in Commission v Hungary (C-769/22), the Court of Justice of the European Union allowed Article 2 TEU to be applied on its own for the first time. This judgment, as well as the wider transformation of Article 2 TEU, raises critical questions about the role of EU values, as well as the Court of Justice’s role in applying the values set out therein.

Author

Martijn van den Brink

Date

14 October 2026

Links

Article

In his article, Martijn van den Brink argues that EU lawyers are ill-equipped to address these questions since they do not appreciate what is unique about constitutional law. EU constitutional law fuses law and politics in such a way that traditional doctrinal methods can be of little use in this domain. Having shown the limits of ‘EU constitutional orthodoxy’ through an analysis of Commission v Hungary, the article, drawing on the work of Martin Loughlin, argues that the method of EU constitutional law is the ‘method of prudence’: a court can strengthen its authority by exercising its powers with care, and weaken it by acting without restraint. From this perspective, the shortcomings of Commission v Hungary and of the value jurisprudence more broadly can be seen more clearly. The case law is characterised by a demise of constitutional prudence.