Legal Interpretation in the EU Law Perspective: General Model and the Context of Penal Law

The purpose of the study is to analyze the most important peculiarities occurring in the interpretation of EU law in the light of the general (classical) model of law interpretation developed in doctrine and judicial practice in national legal orders. This is because, despite the relationship between the two models of interpretation, the characteristics of EU law are the basis for the formation of the distinctiveness of interpretative practice. The latter, assuming that the arrangement of the interpretation process itself does not show significant differences, is analyzed both in the context of the set and role of the sources of law used in judicial interpretation, from which the norms of EU law are reconstructed, as well as the role of the individual rules of interpretation and the mutual relations between them. This analysis allows us to shed light in the last part of the study on the characteristics of the interpretation of criminal law (substantive and procedural), which, although normatively regulated mainly at the level of the law of a member state of the European Union, implements the principle of interpretation consensual with the EU law, being influenced in a significant extent by the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union.