Contesting the Court: Examining Judicial Politics in the European Union

While long considered an important actor in European integration, there are signs that the Court of Justice’s role in EU politics is increasingly contested. This contestation comes from both sides, with national Courts and scholars deriding ‘activist’ rulings in particular areas while simultaneously complaining of a failure to proactively defend European legal values in others. This project aims to revisit the debate over judicial politics in the EU by examining the causes and outcomes of increasing contestation of the EU judiciary. We therefore aim to examine both the factors that lead to contestation and the political, scholarly and substantive outcomes of contestation for the European constitutional order.

In doing so, the project aims to bring together a group of leading lawyers and political scientists within the CIVICA network to examine a key research priority within CIVICA, namely the constitutional resilience of the EU political order and the role of the judicial branch in safeguarding its basic principles. The core of the project will be a set of workshops and a collective publication bringing together experts from six CIVICA partners, junior researchers across the CIVICA network as well as external scholars and practitioners. By focusing on a common area of interest across the CIVICA network, and taking advantage of new research on judicialization in both law and political science, the project plans to lay the foundation for broader and more ambitious research collaboration within CIVICA on international Courts and the European constitutional order.