The relevance of judicial (dis-)trust for the legal integration of the European Union

Introduction

The functioning of the European Union (EU) legal system is ensured through an intricate interdependent and non-hierarchical judicial system, where judges at the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and national courts must rely on the willing cooperation with each other to enforce decisions on EU law matters. Scholars have pointed to the relevance of legal, historical, sociological, and political factors in explaining why courts cooperate within the EU judicial system.

Current Challenges

However, recent scholarly and policy debates underline the relevance of trust-enhancing solutions in addressing some of the current challenges facing the EU legal system: specifically, that of judicial defiance of national courts to the authority of the CJEU. These concerns have been aggravated in the context of democratic and rule of law backsliding in Hungary and Poland, which have raised serious doubts about the correct application of EU law within a network of thousands of national courts.

Need for Theorizing

Despite this incipient interest, we still lack adequate theorizing about the truly sociological and relational nature of this phenomenon. This understanding is crucial for the development of a more fine-grained account of inter-judicial relations and for answering the following questions:

1. What is trust between judges?
2. Which factors make judges trust other judges?
3. What are the implications of judicial trust for cooperation in multi-level systems?

CURIAFIDES Project

The CURIAFIDES project is an interdisciplinary and ground-breaking research project, aiming at investigating the relevance of trust between judges for the cooperation and, subsequently, the legal integration of the EU.

Objectives

The project will articulate a novel socio-legal theory of judicial trust within the EU, which will be based on strong empirical evidence collected from:

• Experiments
• Surveys
• Interviews with CJEU and national judges

The purpose of this research is to define and explain judicial trust and its impact on judicial cooperation, which ties into a broader aim of offering new policy and legal solutions.