Should Preliminary Ruling Procedures at European Court of Justice be Reduced?

Enforcing the European Union legal system is diverse and done on multiple platforms; through not only actions taken against member states for breach of their obligations, but also, for example, through the use of direct effect1. Article 267 TFEU; an organism devised to practice private enforcement of EU law before national courts, has been critical to ensure uniform interpretation and application of EU law in member states. References for preliminary rulings occur when the national courts are presented with a question of EU law due to uncertainty of the provision. The national court will therefore ‘make a reference to the Court of Justice (COJ) to obtain a preliminary ruling on any point of EU law relevant to the proceedings’2. In practice, the introduction of private enforcement of EU law before national courts had been significant to the success of legal order. However over recent years there has been an increase in advocating limiting the lower court’s power to send preliminary references, seeing the desire for a ‘national judicial hierarchy as an important element of the union judicial process’3. It has been proposed that preliminary references are ‘another infant disease’ of the community legal order4, highly unsatisfactory due to the heavy caseload.
Article 267 has been praised for developing the substantive law, creating and upholding many principles; for example, the Van Gend en Loos case which, when concerned with questions of interpretation of union law enabled the ‘CJ to develop the crucial concepts of direct effect and supremacy of union law’5. Another example was shown in the case of Francovich6, which produced indirect effect through the co-operation of the ECJ and the national courts. This doctrine is vital for the development of the system of remedies, which subvert around the restrictions of the strict locus standi requirements of direct actions.
The preliminary reference procedure represents half of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) given

References: BIBLIOGRAPHY Lorna Woods & Phillipa Watson, EU LAW (12th, Oxford University Press, USA 2014) Jan Komárek, 'On the need for hierarchy and differentiation in the preliminary ruling procedure ' (2009) <file:///Users/jadewilliams/Downloads/SSRN-id982529.pdf> Philip Allot, “Preliminary Rulings – Another Infant Desease”, (2000) 25 E.L Francovich v Italy (1990) C-6/90 Rheinmühlen-Düsseldorf v Einfuhr- und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel [1974] Case 166-73 (ECJ) “Precedent in Italy” in: MacCormick, N. and Summers R.S. (eds),Interpreting Precedents: A Comparative Study (Aldershot, 1997) Da Costa en Schaake NV and Others/Nederlandse Belastingadministratie, Joined Cases 28, 29, 30/62 (27 March 1963) 'Europe’s courts under reform pressure ' (www.mpg.de 2012) <http://www.mpg.de/5798998/european_court_reform> accessed 10/1/15 Carl Otto Lenz, 'The Role and Mechanism of the Preliminary Ruling Procedure ' [ 1994 ] Article