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The legal opinion will be rendered in September but this would seem to set a very big precedent whichever way it goes (I understand that France is not a common law country).
This is going before an EU court, and so is a big deal both for what it says about the French law and for how it indicates the court would rule on other states' laws.
This sounds very similar to what I heard about the state in Germany. Would a ruling in this case have potential implications there?
Only indirectly via public opinion, or if the ruling prompts some action in France to push for some legislation in Brussels or a treaty between Germany and France.

It's similar to how a state-level court ruling in Florida has no legal weight on cases in Minnesota. Maybe it stirs some public opinion that spurs on some federal legislation or causes some Minnesota residents to pressure their state legislature for some new laws or some reciprocity agreement with Florida, but there's no legal weight across the disjoint legal systems.

This would be the equivalent of a federal court ruling: it's going before the Court of Justice of the EU, not a French court.
It’s more complex than that. French courts are not subservient to the CJEU (as France is a sovereign country) and whilst precedents at the European level are important, they are not laws. France, like almost all of Europe and the EU, has a civil law system and the courts don’t make the law. The ruling will probably cause legislative changes, but that will be decided by the parliament. It is quite different from how it works in the US’ common law system.
> It’s more complex than that. French courts are not subservient to the CJEU (as France is a sovereign country) and whilst precedents at the European level are important, they are not laws.

Well yes and no. The UK is a sovereign country. France, just as all the EU countries, have to translate EU rules and legislation into national laws in a timely manner and the EU is not exactly kidding with this.

The EUCJ's role is specifically to insure "that EU law is interpreted and applied the same in every EU country; ensuring countries and EU institutions abide by EU law".

That's quite the mission statement.

Basically: France can abide or can get the fuck out the EU, like the UK did.

> The UK is a sovereign country. France, just as all the EU countries

is just as sovereign as the UK. The fact that both countries have made some binding commitments (yes, even the UK) is neither here nor there and the UK is still part of a couple of supra-national clubs. The UK was sovereign as a member-state, in the end, as it demonstrated by leaving.

> have to translate EU rules and legislation into national laws in a timely manner and the EU is not exactly kidding with this.

Yes and no. How exactly the directives are implemented can vary, ans there can be quite a bit of arguing about that as well. And "timely" also varies between months and more than a decade. In the end, it comes down to horse trading in the council ("we'll compromise on your subsidies if you let us keep going on with our pet project"). In any case, it's not really related to the point.

> The EUCJ's role is specifically to insure "that EU law is interpreted and applied the same in every EU country; ensuring countries and EU institutions abide by EU law".

It does not make French courts subservient to it, as it is outside the French legal system. This system is based on civil law and precedents, from French courts or otherwise, are not laws. It is the parliament's job to draft and vote laws, and they usually have quite a lot of freedom in how to interpret EU directives. Also, it's CJEU, for Court of Justice of the European Union.

> Basically: France can abide or can get the fuck out the EU, like the UK did.

Well, pretty much all of the history of the EU and its predecessors from the first Rome treaty shows how unrealistic this sentence is. Hell, the politics in Poland and Hungary right now demonstrate this. The UK did not leave because of the EU's intransigence. In fact, the UK was playing quite well the divide and conquer politics in Brussels.

> > France, just as all the EU countries [..]

> [..] is just as sovereign as the UK.

In theory, perhaps. In practice, certainly not.

The EU has an inner tension between the nominal "principle of subsidiarity"[0] enshrined in the 1992 treaty and the "more Europe" approach which so many EU politicians propose as the solution for any and every problem.

The 1957 Treaties of Rome talked about about "an ever-closer Union", it's not clear exactly what was meant by that...[1]

> It does not make French courts subservient to it, as it is outside the French legal system.

The short version is that EU directives take priority over French [statue] law: [2]

"Thus, by the middle of the nineties, all French courts embraced EU law’s superiority over French law [..] the questions that remained unanswered were whether EU law was superior to the French Constitution?"

[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/7/the-pri... [1] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2016/04/26/what-is-an-ever-cl... [2] https://cesran.org/the-primacy-of-eu-law-over-french-law-eu-...

tl;drFrench courts kind of are subservient to the CJEU, and EU states are not entirely sovereign.

Specifically, certain kinds of rulings (particularly those that prevent a state from doing something) have what's called "direct effect" - they do not require state legislative or administrative action to take effect. States have signed away sovereignty in a very real sense.

Not sure if precedent applies automatically, but this is the EU equivalent of the Supreme Court (-ish). If nothing else, a similar appeal against a similar law will be decided similarly.
Please sue this org into the ground. I'm pretty sure this was the reason What.CD died. There are alternatives now but it's not the same anymore. That move in 2017 killed music in a way.