CJEU - Recent Developments in Value Added Tax 2024

S. 21. The concept of extensive interpretation

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) does not have recourse to the concept of ‘extensive’ interpretation of Union law in its jurisprudence. In general, the Court does not tend to qualify its interpretative approach in a given case as either broad or narrow. The main exception is the Court’s mantra that a derogation from the general scheme of an act of Union law is to be interpreted strictly and that, conversely, exceptions to such a derogation must be interpreted broadly. Even in this particular context, however, the CJEU does not elaborate any further on the general ideas of how restrictive and broad interpretation relate to established concepts of legal methodology. Relevant scholarly treatises and contributions also do not uniformly identify “extensive” interpretative approaches in the Court’s case law as opposed to other forms of interpretation such as “narrow” or “restrictive”. As a consequence, no authoritative or generally accepted understanding exists of what constitutes an “extensive” interpretation in the Court’s case law that the present contribution could endorse as a point of departure. The concept of “extensive” i...