Epilogue: The Ever-Evolving Preliminary Legislative Procedure

This Epilogue to the Special Section on the 2024 Reform of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the EU brings together the various individual elements of the Reform. It assesses their cumulative impact on the preliminary ruling procedure and the judicial style of the Court. It engages with three elements in particular: what the likelihood that in the future, judicial review of EU legislation before the Union Courts is bound to happen primarily within the preliminary ruling procedure, means for the depth and the scope of that review, in particular in cases where complex, technical or scientific assessment of facts is necessary; what impact removal of all direct and indirect identifiers concerning personal data of all natural persons involved in a case have on the judicial style and level of abstraction embraced in deciding cases; as well as what the now Parliament-ordained generalised anonymous transparency, requiring by default the online publication of all written submission after the delivery of the decision on preliminary ruling, might mean for the judicial process and its outcomes. The overall conclusion is that the institutional and procedural choices made in 2024 confirm that the preliminary ruling procedure, originally conceived as a tool of bilateral judicial cooperation, has increasingly mutated into an essentially vertical legislative process.