Op-Ed: “What did the German Constitutional Court get right in Weiss II?” by Ana Bobić and Mark Dawson

Tuesday’s decision of the Second Senate seems to have thrown a grenade into the academic community of EU law. This explains the ferocity of some of the reactions, and the instinctive reflex to seek to defend the integrity of the EU legal order. The surrounding economic and public health context adds to the shock: the feeling that EU law is being questioned at a time when it is at its most vulnerable. The truth, however, is that any student reading the German Court’s jurisprudence on quantitative easing (a student who was a good positivist and sought to guide their expectations about future cases through reading the reasoning of previous ones) would not be surprised by this judgment in the least. The Court does little more than follow thr