Promoting Justice after Lisbon: Groundwork for a New Philosophy of EU Law

The Lisbon Treaty’s ratification is complete. This article makes two related claims, one ethical, the other empirical. First, the EU should now be developed with the aim of making it a (more) just institution; and second, the amendments to the Treaties now introduced provide the constitutional inspiration so that the EU can so develop. In particular, there is a prospect for appropriate standards of justice to be applied in part through a revised philosophy of EU law. The article argues that a human rights based approach to values, although not without its difficulties, provides the least divisive and most effective means of achieving this revision.