TY - THES A1 - Bois, Julien Raymond Florent T1 - The Uncertain World of the Court of Justice of the European Union. A Multidisciplinary Approach of the Legitimacy of the EU Judiciary in the 21st century N2 - The Court of Justice of the European Union is one of the most contested European Union institutions. It is a non-majoritarian body that wields power beyond the state and imposes its rule to citizens and directly legitimate national governments. Despite numerous bold rulings that went beyond the expectations of member states, added to the alleged global legitimacy crisis suffered by the EU, the CJEU was the most likely candidate to face total disempowerment. Yet the Court’s mandate has been extended as a result of the economic and financial crisis, and its involvement in the control of the new economic recovery fund in the context of the COVID 19 crisis led 2 member states to lift their veto to the most important recovery plan of the century. How is the Court seemingly not suffering a legitimacy crisis in the 21st century? Answers to this paradox require a comprehensive exercise of theory building of the Court’s legitimacy. The latter is a concept traditionally employed to assess the justified right to rule of powerholders within nation-states and was used to describe the whole polity rather than some of its parts. Existing legitimacy concepts must be refined in order to characterize the transnational non-majoritarian body. The thesis thus provides the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary account of the legitimacy of the CJEU, drawing insights from law, political science and sociology. It recalibrates the use of concepts such as the “input-throughput-output” trichotomy to the specificities of the judiciary and combines theories of judicial review developed in legal scholarship with actor-based accounts found in empirical social sciences. The thesis rejects the division between normative and sociological legitimacy and advocates for a recoupling of both sides in order to have a complete picture of the CJEU’s right to rule. The question of the Court’s audience is crucial. Standards of judicial legitimacy are forged according to the social characteristics of the Court’s attentive public. Since the CJEU is a non-majoritarian institution evolving on the transnational scene and exercises an expert activity discriminating legal specialists from other citizens, the Court’s attentive public is (as determined by the analysis of judicial external visits and the properties of the Court’s followers on Twitter) composed by the EU legal profession. Normative standards of judicial legitimacy in the EU must be forged according to the expectations of the Court’s attentive public while respecting broader social dynamics found in all member states. In terms of the Court’s sources of legitimacy, the Court must respect its ii mandate enshrined in the treaties and judges must be outstanding legal professionals and reflect the population of the member states. It must respect due process and associate its attentive public to the interpretation and enforcement of EU law as much as possible. It must also deliver sound results that correspond to its status as the supreme court of the Union. The thesis concludes by claiming that the CJEU is not suffering a legitimacy crisis in the 21st century. The legitimacy deficits that characterize its activities are progressively or remain minor, and do not outweigh the support that judges built with the legal profession over decades. The thesis nonetheless identified several institutional and behavioral shortcomings and includes a series of recommendations to address the mere legitimacy problems faced the Court today. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 13/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40844 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4084 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D013 + 2021D013+1 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Bois, Julien A1 - Dawson, Mark T1 - Chapter 7: Sociological institutionalism as a lens to study judicialization: a bridge between legal scholarship and political science T2 - The Politics of European Legal Research N2 - Judicialization - and the influence of trans-national Courts - seems a perfect object of study for inter-disciplinary research and a potential spur for methodological innovation. In the case of the European Courts, however, this chapter argues that divides between law and political science have impeded the developments of accounts of judicialization able to take both the legal and political aspects of judicial activity seriously. The chapter discusses sociological institutionalism as an alternative approach to judicialisation. By stressing the importance of legal norms in structuring the 'space' for legal agency while abstaining from the assumption that norms apply equally in all situations, sociological institutionalism provides an inter- disciplinary framework for the study of Courts able to act as a bridge between both disciplines. As the chapter will conclude, while institutionalist approaches are complex and time-consuming, their focus on the language, ideas and cultural assumptions of actors and institutions provide a compelling method for the study of judicial behaviour. Y1 - 2022 SN - 9781802201185 U6 - https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802201192.00014 SP - 94 EP - 108 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bois, Julien A1 - Dawson, Mark T1 - Towards a legally plausible theory of judicialization in the European Union JF - Journal of European Integration N2 - This article examines the development of judicialization literature in the EU arguing that – in spite of the obvious advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration – scholarship on judicialization in law and political science is drafting apart in the 21st Century. While early political science research on the European Courts found theoretical inspiration in legal research, law and political science have increasingly diverging epistemological and methodological starting points. As the article argues, using prominent papers, this results in both disciplines producing partial accounts of judicial change with limited external validity. The article concludes by offering routes to improving the inter-disciplinary foundations of judicialization research. KW - Judicialization; interdisciplinarity; EU law; EU studies; law and politics Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2023.2190104 VL - 45 IS - 5 SP - 823 EP - 842 ER -