Institutional designers of judiciaries often want to provide the appearance of impartiality. As a result, many collegial courts issue per curiam rulings in which judges’ votes are not public. An extensive scholarship, however, provides evidence that ideology and mechanisms of retention affect judicial decision-making. Do per curiam rulings actively mitigate or provide cover for ideological and career-oriented judicial decision-making? I argue that – when serving as the rapporteur (opinion-writer) – a judge on a civil law per curiam court can steer their panel towards the outcome their appointer prefers. When their appointing government turns over, nonetheless, a judge is not compelled to change their decision-making to be in line with their new government, as per curiam rulings protect them from retaliation. An analysis of decisions at the Court of Justice of the European Union provides evidence for this account.

This Article deals with selected issues of judicial protection that arise in the context of the sanctions adopted by the EU against Russia and Belarus after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As most cases challenging the sanctions are pending, this Article draws lessons from the previous case law on EU restrictive measures. It explores what aspects of the sanctions escape judicial review, then profiles of external (or formal) legality of the sanctions, of internal (or substantive) legality, and concludes by assessing the overall role of the Court in EU foreign affairs. The discussion shows that the case law in this area of EU administrative law converges to a great extent with other areas of EU competence, but tensions remain in how the Court may impose substantial constraints to executive discretion in the field of Common Foreign and Security Policy.

In a crisis, ordinary rules must often give way to a more expedient approach. Such emergency competences tend to favour executive decision-making over legislative procedures. In a European Union (EU) shaken by successive crises, this situation risks leading to permanent competence creep. While considerable attention has been devoted to the impact of crisis on legal and political decision-making within the Union, the position of the Court of Justice (CJEU) – and its impact on the distribution of powers within the EU – has been less researched. This Article fills the gap by exploring how the Court reviews the exercise of power in times of crisis by executive actors at the Union and Member State levels. Using migration law as a case study, it qualitatively and quantitatively examines how the CJEU has responded to crisis both in its scrutiny of measures of containment, and through its adjudication of migration cases in general before and after the acute phase of the 2015 refugee crisis. The Article shows that the crisis has led the CJEU to take a more lenient approach towards the executive powers at both the Union and the Member State level. It argues that this effectively amounts to a withdrawal from the judicial control function and enables an expansion of executive power that is likely to have effects lasting beyond any given emergency.

This introductory Article sets out the background and summarises the content of the Symposium on ‘The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) as a Relational Actor’. Observing that the CJEU has been a key player in shaping European legal integration, the Symposium takes as its starting point that courts – and the CJEU is no exception in this regard – are unable to drive developments in isolation. For the Court to carry out its role as guarantor of the Treaties and guardian of the rule of law in the Union, it needs not to isolate itself but to interact with other European Union (EU) and national institutions. Relations, the Symposium argues, are not only unavoidable but also legitimate and even vital for the adequate execution of the judicial function. This introduction briefly explores six of the Court’s most important relationships: those with the other EU institutions; the courts of the Member States; the Member States themselves; the parties appearing before it; other international courts; and the general public. It then summarises the contributions and highlights how they complement each other in examining the CJEU as a relational actor.

Reflexive sociology can contribute to a more holistic understanding of the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU/Court) as a relational actor. This article draws on the Bourdieusian concept of (legal) field as an analytical framework to trace the power relations between the Court and its interlocutors. The analysis develops around four distinct conceptualisations of the Court as a legal field, ranging from its institutional architecture to the three mainstream judicial routes for a case to reach its docket (preliminary reference procedure, action for annulment and infringement procedure). These showcase the varied interactions among the different actors that either shape the Court as an institution or engage with it in the course of its adjudicative function. According to field theory, these interactions take the form of power struggles between the actors comprising a legal field in order to take control of the determination of the law. The actors of a legal field enjoy different positions that formulate their objective relations, and which are contingent on their disposition and capital. Each of the conceptualisations of the Court as a legal field in this article points to distinct power struggles and relations among a similar set of actors. Consequently, using field theory can be a very useful tool to contextualise the role of the Court and to systematically study its judgments, modus operandi and position in the European legal field under a reflexive lens that accentuates the significance of social space and power relations, and pushes for socio-legal and empirical insights.

There has been a turn to fundamental rights in environmental and climate cases before national and international courts in recent years. We know very little whether there has been such a turn in relation to European Union (EU) law before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The CJEU occupies an increasingly relevant position in this nexus between environmental law and human rights because of strong and effective EU enforcement mechanisms, the abundance of specific EU secondary environmental law, the growing role of fundamental rights since 2009 and the self-standing provision on the environment in Article 37 of the Charter. An analysis of the case law, nonetheless, shows that Charter rights that can be used as ‘swords’ in the interest of environmental protection have so far played only a limited role. After explaining the absence of a rights turn, we argue that such a turn is warranted before the CJEU as well, also from a legal perspective. This article examines two potential avenues. The CJEU can derive positive obligations from relevant Charter provisions, including Articles 2 (right to life) and 7 (right to respect for private life and the home) of the Charter, or it can rely more extensively on Article 37 as a tool for interpreting primary and secondary EU law in an environmentally friendly way.

The concept of a systemic fundamental rights violation refers to a particular set of violations that are both widespread and embedded, so their reoccurrence may be assumed to be likely. It takes on at least two distinctive roles in EU asylum law and policy. One role is linked with the functioning of the principle of mutual trust, a principle that obliges Member States to recognise each others’ systems and decisions, presuming them to be legal, apart from exceptional cases. In this context, the principle sets the standard from when the presumption of legality is rebutted. In its conceptualisation and application, it is in tension with European human rights law, and, for a period, set up frictions between the CJEU (in NS/ME and Opinion 2/13) and the ECtHR (in MSS and Tarakhel). This tale of judicial frictions is not merely of historical interest. Its legacy is, we conclude, a thin concept of systemic breach, characterised by an over-individualized approach to assessing the human rights risks. The second role for the concept of systemic violations relates to embedded violations, including at the EU’s external borders. We demonstrate the utility of this other invocation, in particular as systemic breaches often signal deeper rule of law issues both within particular national systems and embedded within the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). We illustrate that the CEAS itself brings about systemic human rights violations. Identifying and responding to the “systemic” in asylum increasingly relates to the credibility of the EU as a Union based on the respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) uses a chamber system to more efficiently decide cases. To what extent, and under what conditions, does the CJEU’s chamber system undermine the consistency of the Court’s application of EU law? This paper contributes to the literature on the internal organization of collegial courts by presenting a computational formal model that predicts (a) that hearing cases in smaller chambers undermines the consistency of the Court’s application of EU law and (b) that the magnitude of this effect is larger when judges’ preferences are more heterogeneous and smaller when plaintiffs strategically bring cases. Based on these findings, I use machine learning and empirical data on CJEU judgments in infringement cases to estimate the degree to which we should expect the chamber system to undermine the consistency of the CJEU’s application of EU law in practice.

This article presents the CJEU Database Platform, which provides scholars with an extensive collection of easily accessible, research-ready data on the the universe of cases, decisions, and judges at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The CJEU Database Platform provides a foundation for the broader CJEU Database currently being developed by The IUROPA Project, a multidisciplinary group of scholars researching judicial politics in the European Union (EU). In this article, we illustrate how the CJEU Database Platform opens the door to new areas of theoretical and empirical research on judicial politics in the EU.

John Witte, Jr.’s book The Blessings of Liberty contains an important message about the origins and continuing relevance of religious liberty. Based on careful historical analysis of the development of religious liberty in England and the US, Witte demonstrates the importance of Protestant thinking both to the right and to human rights more generally. In the process he refutes both Christian and post-Enlightenment sceptics. His discussion of contemporary US and European law shows how much the right is still needed today, despite the claims of contemporary scholars that freedom of religion and belief is a redundant right.