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Keeping the dream alive: the European Court of Justice and the transnational fabric of integrationist jurisprudence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2011

Antoine Vauchez
Antoine Vauchez*
Affiliation:
Research Professor, Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique (CESSP), Université Paris 1-Sorbonne, Paris, France
*
* E-mail: antoine.vauchez@univ-paris1.fr
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Abstract

How does the European Court of Justice (ECJ) firmly maintain a now 45-year-old consistent integrationist jurisprudence when exerting virtually no control over the recruitment of its members (a selection left to national governments)? Rather than considering such judicial consistency over time as a ‘given’, the paper questions the social fabric of judicial preferences. On the basis of a variety of commemorative materials produced within the Court (Festschriften, tributes, eulogies, and jubilees) and never studied so far, the paper stresses the manner in which these rituals are home to social processes of aggregation (into one unique judicial family), demarcation (from the political realm), and self-identification (to roles of so-called ‘founding father’, ‘current spokesmen’, or ‘would-be judges’), thereby enabling transnational role transmission within international courts such as the ECJ.

Keywords

European Court of Justicetransnational elitespolitical sociology
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , 08 February 2012 , pp. 51 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © European Consortium for Political Research 2011

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References

Eulogies referred to in the article

Court of Justice of the European Communities (1976), Judicial and Academic Conference 27–28 September 1976, Luxembourg: OPOCE.Google Scholar
Court of Justice of the European Communities (1979), Formal Sittings of the Court of Justice, Luxembourg: OPOCE.Google Scholar
Court of Justice of the European Communities (1980), Formal Sittings of the Court of Justice 1978 and 1979, Luxembourg: OPOCE.Google Scholar
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