Chapter 4 pivots from daily judicial routine to the bureaucratic politics of hierarchy within civil service judiciaries. Contra the conventional wisdom that applying European law and soliciting theEuropean Court of Justice (ECJ) emancipated lower courts from supreme court control, it argues that the few low-level judges who wield European law to empower themselves are most likely to be positioned within decentralized judiciaries wherein they already enjoy sufficient autonomy and discretion to occasionally promote bottom-up change. European legal integration thus builds upon and is constrained by the hierarchical politics within state judiciaries. To support these claims, the chapter compares the willingness of lower courts to solicit the ECJ and rebel against national law and their superiors in the French administrative courts– a rigid hierarchy under the Council of State– and the French civil courts– a less hierarchical order under the Court of Cassation. For external validity, it concludes with a shadow case study of Germany’s more decentralized administrative judiciary. The chapter speaks to readers interested in the mechanisms of bureaucratic domination within judiciaries, the institutional conditions that enable and quash judicial rebellions, and how hierarchical politics constrain judges’ capacity to serve as agents of change.

Chapter 3 unpacks why national judges broadly eschewed turning to European law and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) when doing so could bolster their own power. It reveals historically rooted practices and knowledge deficits embodied in the trudge of daily work within civil service judiciaries that fostered what I call an “institutional consciousness” of path dependence: An accrued social identity tied to institutional place that magnifies the reputational risks and labor costs of mobilizing European law. This consciousness reifies judges’ sense of distance to Europe, legitimating a renouncement of agency and resistance to change. The core of this chapter revolves around interviews and oral histories with 134 judges across French, Italian, and German courts, contextualized via ethnographic fieldnotes, descriptive statistics, and secondary sources. The chapter will speak to readers interested in a historical and sociological understanding of what path dependence looks, sounds, and feels like in the courthouse, why judges in civil service judiciaries can be likened to street-level bureaucrats, and how immersive fieldwork can illuminate the habitual practices calcifying the behaviors and identities of judges.

Chapter 2 sets the descriptive, theoretical, and methodological stage for revisiting the behavior of national courts in the process of European integration. It describes the central institutional mechanism through which national courts can partner with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to apply European law, exercise de facto judicial review, and promote integration: the “preliminary reference procedure.” It summarizes how national courts’ use of this procedure has been theorized by the prevailing account of the judicial construction of Europe: the “judicial empowerment thesis.” And it highlights suggestive qualitative and quantitative evidence that this thesis may conceal as much as it reveals. The chapter concludes by outlining the fieldwork strategy deployed to revisit the judicial empowerment thesis in Chapters 3 and 4 and probe whether national judges have harbored more diffuse and persistent resistances to European law, the ECJ, and institutional change than has hitherto been acknowledged.