Keeping the dream alive: the European Court of Justice and the transnational fabric of integrationist jurisprudence

Abstract

How does the European Court of Justice (ECJ) firmly maintain a now 45-year-old consistent integrationist jurisprudence when exerting virtually no control over the recruitment of its members (a selection left to national governments)? Rather than considering such judicial consistency over time as a ‘given’, the paper questions the social fabric of judicial preferences. On the basis of a variety of commemorative materials produced within the Court (Festschriften, tributes, eulogies, and jubilees) and never studied so far, the paper stresses the manner in which these rituals are home to social processes of aggregation (into one unique judicial family), demarcation (from the political realm), and self-identification (to roles of so-called ‘founding father’, ‘current spokesmen’, or ‘would-be judges’), thereby enabling transnational role transmission within international courts such as the ECJ.

The judicialisation of EMU politics: Resistance to the EU's new economic governance mechanisms at the domestic level

“…Finally, and taking a more sociological approach ( court‐centred approaches ), a part of the literature argues that activist judges call upon citizens and lawyers to bring cases to court (Vauchez ). Here, the judges aim to boost the authority of European law, as well as their professional prestige and the influence of the court in which they sit, through nudging citizens into bringing cases to the court ( A5 ).…”

‘A very human business’—Transnational networking initiatives and domestic climate action

“…Without sufficient commitment, individuals may decide to abandon a particular movement, cause, or organisation, or fail to carry out the requirements of its members (Hercus, 1999). Indeed, the concept of esprit de corps has been deployed to understand how particular bureaucratic and judicial organisations realise (or otherwise) their goals, including in contexts where opposition exists (Greenwood and Roederer-Rynning, 2015;Juncos and Pomorska, 2014;Vauchez, 2012).…”

Non-elected Political Elites in the EU

“…It was precisely in 1963 and 1964 that the ECJ in the decisions of Van Gend en Loos and Costa v. ENEL established the doctrine of the direct effect and supremacy of European law, thereby forging the fundamentals of a supranational European legal order from which the member states could not escape through non-compliance (Weiler, 1991). The two decisions have in much literature been turned into the veritable 'Big Bang' of European law and remain to this day 'founding myth' of European law (Vauchez, 2012). Interestingly, from 1950 until these landmark decisions the community legal order was anything but the self-sustained supranational legal order of today (Boerger-De Smedt, 2008).…”