TY - JOUR A1 - Çalı, Başak A1 - Koch, Anne A1 - Bruch, Nicola T1 - The social legitimacy of Human Rights Courts: a grounded interpretivist analysis of the European Court of Human Rights JF - Human Rights Quarterly N2 - This article offers an empirically grounded interpretivist theory of the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights based on domestic judicial and political elite accounts of the legitimacy of the Court in Turkey, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The central argument of the article is that the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is based on a constant comparison between the values and goals of domestic institutions and the values and goals of the European Court of Human Rights. More specifically, the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is grounded in the logic of a fair compromise: What actors think they lose by according legitimacy to the European Court of Human Rights must be balanced by what they perceive to gain in return. Three factors organise how actors in different domestic settings struck a fair compromise in their domestic contexts: a) perception of domestic human rights conditions, b) commitment to cosmopolitan ideals of human rights and international law and c) commitment to domestic institutions. KW - European Court of Human Rights KW - legitimacy KW - elite opinion KW - interpretivism Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2013.0057 SN - 1085-794X VL - 35 IS - 3 SP - 955 EP - 984 PB - The Johns Hopkins University Press ER -