In this chapter, I argue that rather than echoing a perception of fundamental rights as principles, and of law as practical reasoning, as the Alexyan theory would want it, the force of proportionality in French public law lies in its aura of value-proof objectivity and scientific correctness. The spread of proportionality thus expresses the mystery surrounding political moral choices in French legal thought. At the same time, it expresses domestic lawyers’ search for a legal science, exempt from subjective moral or ideological evaluations, which could rationalise such choices. Proportionality in French public law has not served so much as a tool for legal change, as the transplant account of its spread would suggest, but rather as a conceptual tool in the hands of the doctrine for systematising and justifying evolutions in domestic judicial review.

This chapter traces the spread and evolution of proportionality in Greek public law. Contrary to English and French public law, proportionality met no major resistance in Greece. It emerged in this context during the 1970s and has been applied as a constitutional principle by courts for more than forty years. Greece is one of the rare legal systems where, since 2001, proportionality explicitly enjoys constitutional status. However, a survey of judicial practice nuances this image of success. Soon after the recognition of the constitutional status of proportionality, its application was limited to a manifest error test. Until the late 1990s, proportionality’s application in judicial review was particularly formal. Its function was more important in substantive case law, where it had a content close to equity. Since its constitutional entrenchment, proportionality is a hegemonic method of reasoning in Greek law. However, consensus as to its content has not led to its consistent application in case law.