Temporal limitation by the Court of Justice of the EU : dealing with the consequences

Temporality is one of the tools enabling courts to deal with the consequences of a judgment. The present paper focuses on the special case of temporality in judicial review type judgments, ie the doctrine of temporal limitation of a judgment by the Court of Justice of the EU in the procedure of a preliminary ruling. Although the primary goal of the doctrine was to avoid harsh consequences in cases determined by the conventional retroactive application of a judgment, the doctrine has created its own costs. The paper is an attempt to discuss the arguments of the Court from the perspective of a consequences-based argumentation regarding the temporal effects of a preliminary ruling. The analysis provided is merely the positive type of insights regarding the current argumentation of the Court which aims to extend the view on the social impact driven argumentation of the Court