You don't think courts would accept that, but you don't know, because EU privacy law is so vague and badly written that the courts regularly "discover" new things about it that nobody had previously considered possible. For example the fact that everyone had a right to remove stuff from search engines if it was about yourself was never written into law by any elected body or even any non-elected body. It was a right that a court simply invented. Ditto for not being able to use Google Fonts.

The EU has had problems with this kind of activist lawmaking for a long time. It's one of the factors behind Brexit. Some Leave campaigners argued that it was impossible to make any kind of deal or compromise with the EU if it meant staying in, because no matter how clearly written it appeared to be and no matter how watertight the international treaty encoding it was, the European courts would simply ignore it and/or rule it invalid. This criticism landed because there was precedent for that, where the courts had previously done exactly the same thing with other agreements. The same debate is now playing out around the ECHR as well, which the UK stayed in because it's not technically an EU court, just a European court. Same cultural issues though.

Are you saying the Brits complained about case law?

Yes bad EU case law that can't be fixed with legislation has been a common complaint of both political parties and independent groups over the years. An example is the Charter of Fundamental Rights which the UK and Poland thought they had negotiated an opt-out of, on the grounds that it was bad law and they didn't want it to apply. The opt-out was negotiated and agreed between all countries and was written in a simple and supposedly "watertight" way. The ECJ simply ignored the agreement and ruled the UK had to obey the Charter anyway.

https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/11/13/the-stolen-refere...

It was one of the events that led to the ECJ's perception as an activist court that makes EU law unknowable, because what is or is not illegal can't be understood by reading the treaties or laws. Here's an example of some British lawyers expressing that view:

https://lawyersforbritain.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/eu-...

The effects of the Charter, whether applied to UK laws made before or after Brexit, cannot be predicted as its operation would be dependent on the rapidly evolving and expansionist case law of the European Court of Justice, and would open the door to judicial adventurism in our own courts.

Not just the UK has complained about this. Here's an example of corruption in the ECJ uncovered by Irish journalists, in which the ECJ was trying to surreptitiously expand EU powers:

https://euobserver.com/investigations/131569

It is clearly corrupt to hear a bogus case like that where the plaintiff doesn't even know they're in a court case at all and both sides are represented by the same firm, yet nothing was ever done about it.

Thank you for being only the second rational argument I've seen in favour of Brexit. The other one was around the inefficiency (~= horse-trading ~= corruption) of divvying up project spending.

There are counter-arguments but I see no need to thrash them out. It's nice just to see some fucking thought.

Surely British case law isn’t at all lacking surprising court decisions

I am glad the UK governments of the recent decade have such a strong stand against corruption, out of their deeply ingrained principles. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If that were the only reason (nobody said it was) then the UK had to leave the UK immediately.

... You're aware that the UK also has courts, which regularly discover rolling new vistas of law, right? Like, the idea that manufacturers have a duty to not make unsafe products (not just in the UK; this was internationally influential) derives in large part from someone finding a snail in a bottle of lemonade a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donoghue_v_Stevenson

I mean, what you're complaining about here is how ~all vaguely modern legal systems work, not anything special about the EU.

There's a long history of activist courts attempting to legislate from the bench. That doesn't make it good, right or that it's just how a modern legal system works. It's clearly not intended to work that way, but vague and badly written law sometimes allows it regardless.

> because EU privacy law is so vague and badly written

It's neither bad nor vaguely written.

It's not courts who "discover" something, it's the predatory industry that keeps discovering that yes, laws matter, and yes, privacy matters.