Suchergebnisse

This article explores why national judges remain passive on EU legal integration by examining judges' reasons for not requesting preliminary rulings from the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The article combines insights from social psychology and literature on the role of national courts in European integration to formulate expectations regarding what type of motives guide national judges' behaviours. Drawing on interviews held with Croatian, Slovenian and Swedish judges, our results reveal three shared reasons judges remain passive: referrals are not required by the formal rules (procedural normative motivation), referrals are not made to protect the parties to the case (substantive normative motivation) and referrals are not made to protect judges' reputations (instrumental motivation). In addition, we unveil motives that are shared by only judges from one or two Member States, such as not referring cases to uphold the capacity of the preliminary ruling procedure (Swedish judges) and not referring cases due to a fear of sanctions and a lack of knowledge and resources (Croatian and Slovenian judges). We discuss these similarities and divergences in light of the theoretical discussion on the role of courts as active or passive actors in EU legal integration.

The European legal order gives an important role to national judges. They are expected to observe EU law rules and apply them to the domestic legal disputes where appropriate. For a long time, the academic literature on the application of European law in the courts of the member states had a normative and doctrinal focus. It described what European law and the Court of Justice of the EU expects from national judges. Data from different studies, however, shows some variation in how judges see this role. Based on these findings, this article introduces four types of rule application, which are constructed along the lines of more or less use of EU law. These types are meant not only to bring order to the data collected but to inspire further research on the influence of the organization of courts and court systems on decision-making patterns.

First published online on 19 February 2020 ; In this article we contribute to a recent strand of literature that revisits the role of hierarchically different national courts in the process of European integration. While the received view emphasizes the dominance of lower courts in the preliminary reference procedure, more recent work documents the rise of peak courts as key interlocutors of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Our contribution adds a hitherto underexplored variable to the existing research by focusing not only on how many references national courts send to Luxembourg but also what importance the CJEU attributes to each individual case. We find that peak court references are generally treated as more important than questions submitted by non-peak courts. Consequently, peak courts have bolstered their position vis-à-vis the CJEU in the process of legal integration. We base our findings on the most comprehensive preliminary rulings dataset to date (n = 10,609) that includes all cases received and decided by the Court between 1961 up to and including 2018.