EU citizenship and the European Court of Justice׳s ‘stone-by-stone’ approach

Examining the seminal judgment of the European Court of Justice (the ‘ECJ’) in the Ruiz Zambrano case (C‑34/09, EU:C:2011:124) and its progeny, this paper is to illustrate the fact that in hard cases of constitutional importance the ECJ follows an incremental approach. This means, in essence, that the ECJ does not take ‘long jumps’ when expounding the rationale underpinning the solution given to novel questions of constitutional importance. On the contrary, the persuasiveness of its argumentative discourse is built up progressively, i.e., ‘stone-by-stone’.