Penteract - the Imperative of Multidimensional Thinking

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At Peeters Law, we work from a thinking model we developed ourselves — the Peeters Law Penteract Methodology.
At first sight, this might seem like an intellectual curiosity, yet it is anything but that.
The multilayered structure of the model shows how legal thought takes shape in the tension between language, norm, and reality.
Applied to the current debate on European legitimacy, it becomes clear how dangerous a one-dimensional framework can be: it inevitably leads to conceptual errors — even among those with high academic or institutional authority.

The Penteract Methodology provides a clear framework for analysing complex legal questions through multiple dimensions, thereby avoiding intellectual short circuits.
This necessity becomes particularly evident in the European context, where the institutional, linguistic and normative layers of law are constantly intersecting.

The Penteract Thinking Model reveals that law can only truly be understood when these dimensions are studied not separately, but in their interrelation.

The debate on the legitimacy of European law is as old as the integration project itself.
Since Van Gend & Loos (1963), jurists have asked how a legal order that does not directly arise from popular sovereignty can nonetheless be democratic.
During every major crisis — the financial crisis of 2008, the migration crisis of 2015, the health crisis of 2020 — the same question resurfaces.

The recent book by Jean-Marc Piret, Popular Sovereignty and the European Democratic Deficit (2025), articulates this unease with striking clarity.
According to Piret, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) seems to operate in a state of “permanent emergency,” where legal coherence replaces political accountability.
His thesis aligns with broader analyses by Dieter Grimm and Marc Elchardus, who point to the erosion of democratic control within supranational structures.

The concern is real, yet the perspective is narrow.
To read European law solely as a vertical chain of command between court and citizen is to reduce a multidimensional system to a single axis.
That reduction creates the illusion that legitimacy can only be institutional.
In contrast, the Penteract Model begins from a different premise: law is not a pyramid but a polyhedron.
It emerges in the resonance between layers — territorial, material, linguistic-cultural, doctrinal, strategic, and reflective.

This essay demonstrates why such multidimensionality is not an academic luxury but a precondition for legal understanding in the European context.
Through familiar examples from case law and practice, it shows how the Penteract Model prevents analysis from collapsing into institutional mistrust or dogmatic simplification.

The European legal order was born of a paradox: a community of states whose legitimacy rests not only on democratic representation but on the autonomy of law itself.
In Van Gend & Loos and Costa v ENEL (1964), the CJEU formulated two founding principles — direct effect and supremacy — that structurally transformed the Union.
From that moment on, EU law applied not only between states but also to individuals: it became part of their legal self-awareness.

Piret reads this evolution as a form of juridical substitution — the judge replacing the political sphere.
That reading is understandable yet incomplete.
What he perceives as “usurpation” can just as well be seen as interdependence.
The autonomy of EU law was not unilaterally imposed; it was continually reaffirmed by the Member States — from the Accession Treaties to the Treaty of Lisbon.
The Court thus functions less as a hierarchical apex than as a coordination point between overlapping rationalities.

This is evident in judgments such as Pringle (C-370/12, 2012) and Weiss (C-493/17, 2018), where the Court delineated the limits of monetary competences without abolishing political discretion.
To interpret these as power grabs is to miss their multilayered nature: the relation between economic policy, constitutional identity and fundamental rights is not a zero-sum game but an interference field of competences.

When law is understood only through hierarchy, the space for reflection disappears.
The jurist sees rules and procedures but no underlying structure.
The Penteract Model restores that vision: institutions are not external to law but within it — carriers of its complexity.

The crisis Piret identifies is thus real but differently meaningful: it is not a degeneration of legitimacy but a critical fault line through which law experiences its own strain and corrects itself.
The jurist who perceives this sees not less order but greater depth.
That is the intellectual and deontological task of the Penteract Model: to restore law to its own dimensions.

Cross-border cases reveal how little territoriality can be taken for granted.
A Belgian entrepreneur signs a contract in Spain, payment passes through a Luxembourg bank, and litigation takes place before a court in Antwerp.
Without territorial analysis the case seems chaotic; viewed through the Penteract lens, each level — local, national, European — contributes its own normative vector.

In Owusu (C-281/02, 2005), the CJEU prohibited a UK court from declining jurisdiction on grounds of forum non conveniens when the Brussels I Regulation (EC No 44/2001) applied.
What might appear, in one dimension, as a loss of judicial discretion is, in penteractic perspective, a redistribution of legitimacy: EU jurisdictional rules guarantee legal certainty for citizens within a shared space.

The same multilayered pattern appears in Universal Music (C-12/15, 2014), where the Court confirmed that jurisdiction continues to hinge on the place where damage occurs — even in cases of online infringement.
The territorial dimension reminds us that law is not geographically territorial but functionally territorial: it follows the social reality of transactions rather than the boundaries on a map.

Norms presuppose values.
EU law continuously oscillates between economic integration and social protection.
The Gauweiler (C-62/14, 2015) and Weiss (C-493/17, 2018) judgments illustrate this tension: the Court accepted broader powers for the European Central Bank but linked them to tests of proportionality and parliamentary oversight.

A one-dimensional reading would call this technocratic; a penteractic reading recognises a balance between stability and solidarity.
Law does not weigh absolute values but keeps them in motion.
Likewise, in Test-Achats (C-236/09, 2011) — prohibiting gender discrimination in insurance premiums — the Court made clear that market efficiency remains subordinate to equality.
The material dimension compels the jurist to ask: what conception of the human being underlies this norm?

In a multilingual legal order, translation is not a technical act but a juridical one.
In Kubicka (C-218/16, 2017), the CJEU examined whether a Polish legacy per vindicationem could be recognised under German succession law.
The notion of “acquisition by operation of law” carried different semantic weight in each system.
By opting for a functional interpretation — reading the term by purpose and context — the Court revealed that multilingualism is not interference but the breathing rhythm of law.

Similarly, Mahnkopf (C-558/16, 2018) confirmed that EU succession rules do not replace national concepts but bring them into dialogue.
To ignore linguistic variation is to deprive law of its plural nature.

No judgment arises in a vacuum.
The doctrines of supremacy and fundamental rights protection evolved through a sustained dialogue between Luxembourg and national constitutional courts.
The German Solange I decision (BVerfGE 37, 1974) declared that EU norms would apply “so long as” fundamental rights were respected;
Solange II (BVerfGE 73, 1986) reaffirmed that trust.
The Spanish Melloni judgment (C-399/11, 2013) confirmed the primacy of EU law over higher national standards of protection, though only within the bounds of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The Italian Taricco II decision (C-42/17, 2017), following dialogue with the Italian Constitutional Court (Corte Costituzionale), added nuance: national identity may protect legal certainty without negating the European project.

The doctrinal dimension makes visible that legitimacy rests not on obedience but on memory: law speaks with the voices of its past.
To ignore this layer is to read judgments as politics; to know it is to recognise legal genealogy.

Every legal order experiences moments of acceleration.
During the COVID-19 crisis, the Commission adopted a Temporary Framework for State aid (2020/C 91 I/01), intended to coordinate national rescue measures.
What might appear, from one angle, as technocratic dominance is, in penteractic perspective, a strategic acceleration within a field of slow structures.
The model helps the jurist understand why a measure was legally possible, without thereby exonerating it morally.

To think strategically in law is to recognise time as a variable: norms live not only in hierarchy but in rhythm.

The European legal order contains its own mechanisms of self-correction.
Clashes between the CJEU and national courts are not signs of disintegration but occasions for reflection.
In Taricco II (2017), the Court accepted that Italy could apply the earlier judgment only within constitutional limits of legal certainty.
In PSPP (BVerfG, 5 May 2020), the German Federal Constitutional Court declared, for the first time, a CJEU judgment ultra vires, while simultaneously reaffirming its commitment to the EU legal order.
These are not ruptures but mirror moments — points where law perceives itself.

The penteractic jurist recognises such moments as sources of clarity.
The fault line is not an end but a sign of institutional maturity.
Within that lies the ethics of resonance which the Penteract Model seeks to cultivate.

Law is not a closed system of rules but an ongoing process of observation.
The jurist working within the Penteract Model learns not only what norms mean but where and how they acquire meaning.
As Paul Ricoeur wrote, one must look at law “not as an object” but “through its hermeneutical horizon.”

In an age where digitalisation threatens to reduce legal analysis to algorithm, this reflective gaze becomes a professional duty.
Interpretation without context is not knowledge but procedure.
The Penteract Model restores context as a normative criterion: place, language, time, and the fault lines that sustain every rule.
In the spirit of Walter van Gerven, legal insight arises only where system and humanity intersect.

Classical positivism taught that judges merely apply the law.
Yet within the European legal order, application is always interpretation.
The Penteract Model makes this explicit: every legal act implies a choice of perspective.

For advocates, magistrates and policymakers, professional integrity thus coincides with positional awareness.
Without the territorial dimension, competence is misunderstood;
without the linguistic dimension, meaning is lost;
without the doctrinal layer, origin is forgotten;
without the strategic layer, direction is absent;
without the reflective layer, self-critique disappears.
The penteractic method prevents errors in thinking from translating into errors in action.

Piret and Grimm describe the European legal order as a space of structural mistrust between court and citizen.
The Penteract Model invites the opposite: institutional humility as a form of trust.
The jurist need not idealise the system, but may still regard it as a living organism — one that continually corrects itself through its fault lines.

This insight is not naïve but historically grounded.
The European Union has repeatedly shown that it can absorb legal critique without disintegration: from Solange II to Taricco II, from Weiss to PSPP.
Such moments of tension are, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, not “crises of legitimacy” but “phases of learning.”

The sixth dimension of the model — the reflective or Heyvaertian singularity — is not an aesthetic coda but the point where law senses its own limits.
It is the moment when the norm becomes aware of its insufficiency.
In that vulnerability lies its human strength.

The jurist who thinks through this method recognises that every norm is only temporarily stable.
This stance echoes Georges Canguilhem’s notion of the “normativity of the living”: the capacity to reform oneself without losing identity.
In legal terms, it means the ability to self-correct without self-abolition.

The Penteract Model conceives law not as hierarchy but as a space of resonance.
Within that space, every actor — advocate, judge, legislator — can play a role without detaching from the whole.
It is a form of trust that is neither blind nor cynical.
Law remains human precisely because it can expose its own fault lines.

In this sense, applying the Penteract Model is not only an analytical method but a deontological responsibility.
It preserves what, in every era, risks being lost: the willingness to think before judging, and to situate oneself before speaking.
In the spirit of Pierre Rosanvallon, legitimacy arises not from obedience but from the visibility of reasonableness.

The Penteract Model makes that reasonableness visible.
It restores to law its multilayered depth — and, in the most literal sense, its humanity.

The Penteract Thinking Model did not arise in a vacuum.
Its methodological foundation lies with Walter van Gerven, whose vision of multilayered law shaped the structure of this model and still defines its deepest line.
The insights of Paul Ricoeur and François Ost & Michel van de Kerchove illuminate its hermeneutical and linguistic dimensions, while Alfons Heyvaert, with his analytical precision and dissective method, inspired the sixth, reflective dimension.
Pierre Rosanvallon provides the model’s moral horizon, showing that legitimacy arises not only from rules but also from trust and visibility.
In the background echo the voices of Jürgen Habermas, Georges Canguilhem, and Hannah Arendt, reminding us that law, like language, is a living organism that continually reforms itself.
By bringing these influences together, the Penteract aims not to add a new theory but to offer a framework in which these voices converge — a geometry of law that remains both structured and human.

Karen-Anne Peeters, 5 October 2025

The full bibliography and footnote apparatus — including references to primary and secondary legal sources and to the works of Professor Emeritus Walter van Gerven — are available from Peeters Law upon request.
This choice rests on two considerations: first, ensuring the factual accuracy of every reference; second, protecting the original methodological structure of the Penteract Model from careless or unauthorised reuse.
Transparency is thus preserved within a framework that reconciles intellectual integrity and respect for authorship with professional discretion.