Penteract - the Imperative of Multidimensional Thinking

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At Peeters Law, we begin from a conceptual framework of our own design — the Peeters Law Penteract Methodology.
At first sight, this may appear to be an intellectual curiosity; it is not.
The multilayered structure of this model reveals how legal reasoning takes shape in the tension between language, norm, and reality.

This framework, too, does not escape the very laws it seeks to expose.
The Penteract model can — and indeed must — be applied to itself.
Those who move through its dimensions will see that the model is also subject to its own tensions, among them the danger of treating multilayeredness as a value in itself.

Such tensions are not flaws but signs of life: they show that the model does what it promises — it invites the jurist to think with the law, but also against the law, and thus, ultimately, against oneself.

In that sense, the model is not complete but alive: it moves, corrects, and questions itself — precisely as any law must, if it wishes to keep breathing.

Applied to the current debate on European legitimacy, it shows how dangerous a one-dimensional framework can be: it inevitably leads to conceptual error, even among those with high academic or institutional authority.

The Penteract Methodology offers a clear framework for analysing complex legal questions across multiple dimensions and thus prevents intellectual short-circuits.
This necessity is most evident in the European context, where institutional, linguistic and normative layers of law continuously intersect.
The model makes visible that law can only truly be understood when these dimensions are studied not in isolation, but in their interaction.


1. Introduction — Why the Debate on European Legitimacy Reveals Our Own Thinking

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 arise directly from popular sovereignty can nevertheless be democratic.
In times of crisis — the financial crash of 2008, the migration crisis of 2015, the health crisis of 2020 — this question resurfaces with new urgency.

The recent book by Jean-Marc Piret, Popular Sovereignty and the European Democratic Deficit (2025), expresses that unease with clarity.
According to Piret, the Court of Justice of the European Union operates in a “permanent state of exception,” where juridical coherence replaces political accountability.
His thesis echoes broader analyses by Dieter Grimm and Marc Elchardus, who warn of a loss of democratic control within supranational structures.

Their concern is genuine, yet their perspective is narrow.
To read European law solely as a vertical line of authority between judge and citizen is to reduce a multidimensional system to a single axis.
That reduction feeds the illusion that legitimacy can only be institutional.
The Penteract Model proceeds from another premise: law is not a pyramid but a polyhedron — born from resonance between layers, territorial, material, linguistic-cultural, doctrinal, strategic, and reflective.

This essay demonstrates that multidimensionality is not an academic luxury but a prerequisite for genuine understanding in European law.
Through recognisable examples from case law and practice, it shows how the Penteract Model prevents analysis from degenerating into institutional distrust or dogmatic simplification.


2. Institutional Narrowing — When Hierarchy Obscures Vision

The European legal order emerged from a paradox: a community of states whose legitimacy stems not only from democratic representation but from the autonomy of law itself.
In Van Gend & Loos and Costa v ENEL (1964), the Court articulated two founding principles — direct effect and supremacy — that transformed the Union’s structure.
From then on, Union law applied not merely between states but also to citizens: it became part of their legal self-consciousness.

Piret reads this evolution as juridical substitution — the judge replacing politics.
That reading is understandable yet incomplete.
What he calls “usurpation” can equally be read as interdependence.
The autonomy of Union law was not unilaterally imposed; it was reaffirmed by the Member States themselves — from the Acts of Accession to the Treaty of Lisbon.
The Court thus functions less as a hierarchical summit than as a coordination point among overlapping rationalities.

This appears clearly in Pringle (C-370/12, 2012) and Weiss (C-493/17, 2018), where the Court delineated the boundaries of monetary competence without extinguishing political space.
To interpret this as institutional overreach is to miss the multilayered dynamic: the relationship between economic policy, constitutional identity and fundamental rights is not a zero-sum game but an interference field of competences.

When law is seen only through hierarchy, reflection disappears.
The jurist perceives rules and procedures but no underlying structure.
The Penteract restores that depth of vision: institutions do not stand outside the law but within it — as carriers of its complexity.

The crisis Piret identifies is therefore real but misinterpreted: it is not a decay of legitimacy but a critical fault line through which law subjects itself to pressure and correction.
The jurist who recognises this sees not less order but more depth.
That is the intellectual and deontological task of the Penteract Methodology: to return law to its own dimensions.


3. The Penteract in Application — Six Dimensions of Insight

3.1  The Territorial Dimension — Where Law Takes Place

Cross-border practice shows how little “territory” can still be taken for granted.
A Belgian entrepreneur signs a contract in Spain, payment passes through a Luxembourg bank, and litigation arises in Antwerp.
Without territorial analysis, the case appears chaotic; through the Penteract lens, it reveals that each level — local, national, European — adds a normative vector.

In Owusu (C-281/02, 2005), the Court forbade a British judge to decline jurisdiction on forum non conveniens grounds when the Brussels I Regulation applied.
What seemed a loss of discretion was in fact a redistribution of legitimacy: uniform jurisdictional rules ensure legal certainty for citizens across a shared legal area.
The same logic recurs in Universal Music (C-12/15, 2014): even online, jurisdiction follows the place where harm occurs.
Law is thus functionally, not geographically, territorial — it follows social reality, not maps.

3.2  The Material Dimension — What Law Protects

Norms imply values.
European law oscillates between economic integration and social protection.
Gauweiler (C-62/14, 2015) and Weiss (C-493/17, 2018) illustrate this tension: the Court accepted wide powers for the ECB but linked them to proportionality review and parliamentary oversight.
A narrow view calls this technocratic; the Penteract sees balance — stability and solidarity kept in circulation.
In Test-Achats (C-236/09, 2011) the Court held that market efficiency yields to equality.
The jurist must ask: what image of humanity does this norm sustain?

3.3  The Linguistic-Cultural Dimension — How Language Shapes Law

In a multilingual legal order, translation is itself a legal act.
In Kubicka (C-218/16, 2017) the Court asked whether a Polish legacy per vindicationem could be recognised in German succession law.
“Acquisition by operation of law” carried distinct meanings in both systems.
By reading the term functionally — by purpose and context — the Court revealed that multilingualism is not noise but the breath of law.
Similarly, in Mahnkopf (C-558/16, 2018) the Court confirmed that European succession law engages in dialogue with, not replacement of, national concepts.
Language variation is not an obstacle but the medium of plurality.

3.4  The Doctrinal Dimension — The Inheritance of Thought

No judgment arises in a vacuum.
The doctrines of supremacy and fundamental rights matured through dialogue between Luxembourg and national constitutional courts.
Germany’s Solange I (1974) held that EU norms apply only “so long as” they respect rights; Solange II (1986) renewed that trust.
Spain’s Melloni (C-399/11, 2013) reaffirmed EU primacy within Charter limits; Italy’s Taricco II (C-42/17, 2017) nuanced it, allowing national identity to protect legal certainty without denying Europe.
Legitimacy rests not on obedience but on memory.
Law speaks with the voices of its past; ignoring them reduces jurisprudence to politics.

4. Strategic and Reflective Dimensions — Direction and Self-Understanding

4.1  The Strategic Dimension — Rhythm and Direction

Every legal order accelerates at certain moments.
During the COVID-19 crisis, the Commission’s Temporary Framework on State Aid (2020/C 91 I/01) coordinated national rescue measures.
What seemed technocratic overreach was, in Penteract terms, a strategic acceleration within a field of slower structures.
Strategic reasoning means recognising time as a legal variable: norms live not only in hierarchy but in rhythm.

4.2  The Reflective Dimension — When the System Sees Itself

The European legal order possesses mechanisms of self-correction.
Conflicts between the Court of Justice and national courts are not fractures but mirrors.
In Taricco II (2017) the Court allowed Italy to apply EU law only within constitutional limits.
In PSPP (2020) the German Constitutional Court declared an EU ruling ultra vires yet reaffirmed fidelity to Union law.
Such encounters are not disintegration but maturation — moments when law recognises itself.
The Penteract jurist reads these not as threats but as sources of clarity: resonant ethics arise where law perceives its own edges.


5. Why the Penteract Model Constitutes a Responsibility

5.1  Rediscovering the Legal Gaze

Law is a process of perception.
The Penteract jurist learns not only what rules mean but where and how they mean.
Following Ricoeur, law must be seen through its hermeneutic horizon.
In an algorithmic age, contextual interpretation becomes a duty.
Context — place, language, time, fracture — is the normative condition of understanding.
In Van Gerven’s words, insight appears where system meets humanity.

5.2  Deontological Depth — The Ethics of Situating

Every application of law is interpretation.
Each legal act implies a chosen perspective.
Integrity therefore equals awareness of position:
without the territorial layer, one misreads competence;
without the linguistic, meaning;
without the doctrinal, heritage;
without the strategic, direction;
without the reflective, self-critique.
The Penteract prevents intellectual error from becoming ethical failure.

5.3  Institutional Humility and Trust

Against Piret’s “space of distrust,” the Penteract proposes institutional humility as trust.
The EU proves capable of absorbing critique: from Solange II to Taricco II, from Weiss to PSPP.
As Habermas observed, these are not crises of legitimacy but “phases of learning.”
Institutions correct themselves through tension — not despite it.

5.4  The Heyvaertian Horizon — Law as Self-Understanding

The sixth, Heyvaertian dimension is where law senses its own limit.
Here, norm and vulnerability coincide.
Following Canguilhem’s idea of the normativity of the living, law reforms itself without losing identity — self-correction without self-destruction.
That capacity is the human core of legal order.

5.5  On Democracy, Legitimacy, and the Danger of Purity

The call for “purity” — voiced by Piret and Elchardus in Rousseauian tones — misreads democracy as origin rather than responsibility.
In 2008, Europe faced economic collapse: banks failed, savings vanished, families lost homes, youth unemployment soared.
Had leaders awaited perfect democratic consent, the eurozone would have dissolved.
The ECB and the Commission acted — legally daring, morally necessary.
Pringle (2012) and Gauweiler (2015) later confirmed compatibility with the Treaties.
Those imperfect acts saved millions from poverty and restored trust that no statute alone could restore.

Purist thought would have left Europe juridically immaculate but socially uninhabitable.
It protects principle while abandoning people — coherence above care, system above society.
Purity is not ethical; it is ethically indifferent.
European law, since Van Gend & Loos, recognises legitimacy as reciprocal: institutions and citizens co-create responsibility.
The true divide today lies between responsibility and inertia.
An economy can recover from debt, not from paralysis.
Purity is a temptation; responsibility, the modern form of legitimacy.
Where purity hardens, responsibility restores the breath of both law and society.

5.6  The Importance of the Penteract — Law as Multidimensional Responsibility

The 2008 crisis proved that legitimacy emerges from action, not stillness.
The Penteract provides the tools to understand action without absolutising it.
Law is just only when seen in full depth — institutional, material, linguistic, doctrinal, strategic, and reflective.
Where others collapse thought into sovereignty, the Penteract restores balance: between norm and context, rule and person, system and care.

In practice, the jurist situates every decision:
reading its territorial scope, understanding its language in translation, knowing its doctrinal lineage, feeling its temporal rhythm, acknowledging its reflective limit.
This is not abstraction but professional necessity.
Without it, law degenerates into instrumentality or ideology.

The Penteract’s strength lies in its relational gaze: every legal act carries an ethical weight because it intervenes in the fabric of trust.
In crises — financial, ecological, institutional — this awareness shields against two extremes: technocratic absolutism and populist moralism.
Thus, the Penteract is more than an analytical model; it is a deontological posture.
Law is forged not only in texts and judgments but also in how one observes, listens, and weighs.
As Van Gerven wrote, law exists “between system and humanity” — and within that interval resides responsibility.

The Penteract keeps that space open.
It offers not certainty but clarity; not purity but balance.
In that balance lies the most sustainable legitimacy: not of origin, but of care.

5.7  The Ethic of Resonance — Concluding Reflection

The Penteract conceives law not as hierarchy but as resonance.
Within that space, each actor — advocate, judge, legislator — performs a role without severing connection to the whole.
It is a trust neither blind nor cynical.
Law remains human precisely because it can display its own fractures.

The Penteract Methodology is therefore both analytical and ethical.
It preserves what each era risks losing: the readiness to think before judging, to situate before speaking.
In Rosanvallon’s sense, legitimacy arises not from obedience but from visible reason.
The Penteract makes that reason visible — restoring to law its layered depth and, in doing so, its humanity.


Karen-Anne Peeters
Antwerp, 5 October 2025


Bibliographical Note

The methodological foundations of the Penteract rest on Walter van Gerven’s multilayered vision of European law.
Its hermeneutic and linguistic dimensions draw from Paul Ricoeur and François Ost & Michel van de Kerchove; its analytical precision and dissective ethos from Alfons Heyvaert.
Pierre Rosanvallon lends it a moral horizon by showing that legitimacy arises not only from rules but from trust and visibility.
In the background resonate the voices of Jürgen Habermas, Georges Canguilhem, and Hannah Arendt, who remind us that law — like language — is a living organism, constantly reforming itself.
The Penteract does not add a new theory but offers a geometry of law in which these voices converge — structured yet humane.