El principio de coherencia en el Derecho internacional privado europeo

Abstract

The present study contains a critical analysis of the scope of the principle of coherence or consistency principle in the field of European private international law. First, the author analyzes the areas in which the requirement of legal coherence between concepts, notions and legal solutions is required: vertical (successive normative texts on the same subject), horizontal (normative texts on different subjects) and transversal (European and non European legal rules). The logic of integration can lead to a formal understanding of the principle of coherence as a mere parallelism between concepts and legal solutions in the systematic interpretation of European private international law. A casuistic analysis tries to demonstrate such a risk as well as the need for an axiological, relative and dialectical understanding of the coherence principle, which requires a comparison of legal objectives and values issue-by-issue, discarding any possibility to resort to an automatic parallelism of concepts or legal solutions.