Political philosophers that espouse theories of global justice engage with the question of what duties we owe to each other from an abstract, ideal, point of view, whilst judges consider matters of justice from the much more practical, non-ideal, position. In an effort to trace whether there is cross-pollination between global justice discussions on migration and the asylum practice of the European Court of Justice, this work offers a thorough qualitative empirical study of the Court's asylum jurisprudence enriched by insight from a dozen interviews conducted with officials working there. It utilises Martha Fineman's ‘vulnerability theory' as a brokering agent between the two disciplines and as an original way of taxonomizing the case-law of the ECJ. In the process, this thesis becomes a solid interdisciplinary work which is an important contribution towards our understanding of the Court, both from a legal and from a philosophical point of view.