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Comment by havkom | Hacker News Reader

The main parts of this judgement were very unsurprising. It is very well established in EU law that a higher national court can not order a lower court to withdraw a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union.

EU law normally override EU member state national law. The EU court is the final interpreter on EU law.

The thinking about lower courts unappealable ability to ask the EU court for what the EU law is, that a higher or highest national courts should never be able to suppress a question from reaching the EU court.

Hence, if the Supreme Court in a member state would give a final ruling on a topic, any lower court that thinks the Supreme Court were wrong on points of EU law, may always in a following case ask the EU court for final guidance on what EU law actually means (instead of just following the Supreme Court ruling). The Supreme Court would in that instance have no means of preventing that from happening.

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Additional information if anyone is interested:

In general, I believe for example the US court system hierarchy (where you appeal instance by instance in serial order) is very different from the EU court system (when it comes to interpretation on EU law).

Lower courts MAY ask the EU court for guidance on what EU law means while the court of last instance for a type of case (the highest court) MUST ask the EU court on what the EU law means if it is not clear.

Here is the relevant text in the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU):

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...

If anyone is interested in more information of exceptions from referring to the EU court you can read up on the doctrine of acte clair and acte eclairé. This doctrine is now always followed (nd may sometimes be difficult to follow) by court of last instance so it is important that lower courts can ask if they think the higher court has made an error in relation to this.

Actually it is not _that_ different.

It is similar how you can move constitutional questions from state to federal court in the USA, with the main difference being that EU does not have federal circuits of courts like USA does, but effectively only a supreme court.

Indeed. This is completely unrelated to the details of the case - it is simply unacceptable that a higher court can effectively gag a lower court from referring to the EU court.

The brazen contempt for the spirit of the law that Facebook (among many other companies) display never ceases to amaze me.

It is unsurprising, given the spirit of capitalism, that companies behave in a cut-throat manner - it's a race to the bottom. Whoever doesn't 'go there' will be surpassed by whatever narcissistic corp is willing to go there. This is simply the way everything is wired up to work.

Corporations, and the people that run them, will test the limits of acceptability all the time just to get the edge on the competition - it's how they survive.

Unsurprising given not the nature of Capitalism, but of humankind. Capitalism was conceptualized as the most effective method of containing these impulses. But don’t assume this “race to the bottom” doesn’t exist outside of capitalism, especially considering the rich history showing the opposite. Is there a socialist government where the powerful aren’t rich in a much more inequitable distribution of wealth (for what little they create)?

Very succinctly put. Reminded me of this brief clip:

Milton Friedman - Your Greed or Their Greed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

> Is there a socialist government where the powerful aren’t rich in a much more inequitable distribution of wealth

Perhaps:

In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say...

Cuba?

>Capitalism was conceptualized as the most effective method of containing these impulses.

This is terribly incorrect. It only increases these impulses, competition is at its heart. Everything becomes gamified, a competition, a race to the top while simultaneously pushing everyone else to the bottom.

I'm really interested to watch some of the markets pop up in Cuba because I think there needs to be a healthy balance between Capitalism and Socialism for innovation, and care for the workers who produce literally everything.

Ironic that you picked Cuba when just a few weeks ago Castro’s grandson made the news for displaying his inordinate amount of wealth. In a country so our hospitals outside of the capital are indistinguishable from abandoned buildings, how does someone like that become filthy rich? It’s not like socialist countries don’t have greed and theft of national wealth, it’s just the people doing it are literally the government and hide it better - also note their greed and theft goes mostly unchecked.

I don't see what other social structures have to do with my point. You can't just say 'hey other stuff is shit too' as an argument against me saying 'this thing here is broken sometimes'.

My point was we should look deeply at the society we are invested in and understand that the things we endorse and benefit from daily have intrinsic side-effects.

Nothing is perfect, of course object to what you don't like, but be grown up enough to understand your part in it and humble enough to understand no system is perfect.

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