FREE MOVEMENT OF GOODS

The end of 2012 will herald the twentieth anniversary of 'deadline 1992', the projected date for the completion of the EU's internal market. Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 references to '1992' have been deleted from the Treaties, and so it may be tempting to suppose, rather more than twenty years since the first contribution on the Free Movement of Goods to this section of the Quarterly,1 that this is old news. Isn't the law governing the internal market in general and the free movement of goods in particular now well settled? © Far from it! This remains a dynamic area of the law. The broad concept of the internal market may be well enough understood-it is, according to Article 26 TFEU, 'an area without internal frontiers in which the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured in accordance with the provisions of the Treaties'. But much detail remains contested. In particular there are persisting questions about, first, the type of practice that is subject to control in the name of protecting the free movement of goods (below, B) and, second, the extent to which trade-restrictive practices may be justified (below, C). These are matters that focus on the interpretation given to the key Treaty provisions by the Court of Justice. Then, in so far as diverse national measures remain justified, attention turns to harmonization of laws at EU level as the method to deepen the process of integration-through-law: this turns the focus to the legislative institutions of the EU rather than its judicial institution, although the Court retains a key role in determining the proper limits of legislative harmonization (below, D). More generally the development of the internal market, built on this basic foundation of rules that challenge national trade barriers and provide scope for EU rule-making in partial or total replacement for national regulatory choices, requires tools that ensure its effective 'management' (below, E). In this sense '1992' was merely a milestone: the internal market is a process not an event. Copyright © British Institute of International and Comparative Law 2012.