National constitutional identity articulates constitutional conflicts between national and supranational legal orders in the form of judicial resistance against the primacy of EU law. The book critically engages with national constitutional identity on the level of constitutional theory and through a detailed analysis of its practical use, as interpreted by the CJEU and apex courts across the Member States. Moreover, the book introduces a novel framework of ‘identity clusters’, which evaluates identity claims due to their justificatory reasons or rationales. Finally, the book draws a structural comparison between national constitutional identity claims and the concepts of civil disobedience and conscientious objection. Identity claims, like civil disobedience, highlight deficiencies in the legal system and resist the EU law until these deficiencies are not addressed. In connection with conscientious objection, identity claims underscore individual circumstances that cannot be reconciled within the broader legal framework.

The publication of this work was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.