The Europeanization of national judiciaries: definitions, indicators and mechanisms

ABSTRACT

The article is underpinned by the idea that the national courts/judges are expected to act as decentralized European Union (EU) judges. This is motivated by the fact that the general knowledge concerning the impact of EU law on the functioning of national courts as EU judges and the process of Europeanization of national judiciaries is still somewhat scattered and fragmented. The central ambition of this article is to provide a theoretical framework that would contribute to the understanding of Europeanization of judiciaries by: (1) offering a definition and theoretical developments useful for the study of Europeanization and its dynamics; (2) exploring the diverse indicators to operate the concept; and (3) providing explanations on how Europeanization might happen by identifying the distinct mechanisms potentially in play. By and large, the article proposes theoretical and empirical developments, which will facilitate embracing the project of constructing a composite framework for the socio-legal study and measurement of the Europeanization of national courts.

KEYWORDS:

• CJEU
• court of justice of the EU
• EU law
• Europeanization
• national courts
• national judiciaries

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to Stine Resen who carefully reviewed this article. The authors also thanks Mikael Rask Madsen for sharing his data on international judges and the two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Urszula Jaremba is Assistant Professor in EU law at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance, School of Law, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Juan A. Mayoral is Assistant Professor in Law and Politics at iCourts – Centre of Excellence for International Courts, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

ORCID

Urszula Jaremba http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5296-7497

Juan A. Mayoral http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7192-3967

Notes

1. The informal reference to ‘European values and norms’ encompasses terms like ‘European values and norms’, ‘community obligations, ‘European integration’, ‘European communities’, or similar.

2. Data from the official database: http://www.poderjudicial.es/search (accessed 20 May 2017).

3. C-224/01 Gerhard Köbler v. Republik Österreich.

4. This dichotomy is becoming less significant in EU law because of the principle of direct effect.

5. Source: iCourts’ dataset on International Judges by Mikael Rask Madsen.

 

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly conducted under the auspices of iCourts, the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for International Courts, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation [grant number DNRF105].