Op-Ed: “Why Bother with Legal Reasoning? The Legality of Export Restrictions in Commission v. Hungary (C-499/23)”

My colleague Martijn van den Brink will hopefully forgive me for borrowing the title of his own blogpost, ‘Why bother with legal reasoning’, written in relation to Commission v. Malta (C-181/23). The judgment in Commission v. Hungary (C-499/23) concerns a different subject matter and arguably has more limited implications, but it reveals similar tendencies in the Court’s willingness to dispense with rigorous legal reasoning, even in cases that, unlike Commission v Malta, present no difficulty and result in a hardly contestable outcome. The present judgement is also interesting on substance because it involves a type of measure seldom adopted by Member States, export restrictions –  these had briefly been revived in the context of the COV