Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe
Alec Stone-Sweet
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0198297718
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is the first comparative study written by a social scientist on the topic of European constitutional courts and their role in protecting human rights and defending new democratic institutions. Focusing on France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the European Union, the author traces the enormous impact of these courts on both legislative and judicial processes and outcomes, and explains why this impact continues to expand.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Supreme Court Justices in the Post-Bork Era: Confirmation Politics and Judicial Performance
Employment Law for Human Resource Practice (South-Western Legal Studies in Business Academic)
University of Aix-en-Provence (France), Michael Pretina and the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France), Yves Meny and the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), Sally Kenney and the Obermann Center of Advanced Studies (University of Iowa), Giuseppe di Federico and the Institute for Research on Judicial Systems (Bologna, Italy), and the Max Planck Institute for International and Comparative Law (Heidelberg, Germany) arranged or granted resident fellowships. I
that the dispute resolver believes will not provoke A to refuse compliance. The space between B.2 and A.2 constitutes the dispute resolver's assessment of the range of decision-making outcomes that will lead to the resolution of the dispute, to compliance, and (much the same thing) to the re-establishment of a disputed rule. The calculus also helps her to fashion FIG. 1.2. The dispute resolver's calculus. Norms, Dispute Resolution, Judicialization 17 settlements that avoid the declaration of a
system for the state, would only be assured if the superior status of the constitution law, atop a hierarchically ordered system of legal norms, could be guaranteed by a 'jurisdiction', or 'court-like' body. Because Kelsen foresaw nearly all of the variations on the model now in place, and because Kelsen's constitutional theory is the standard reference for debates about the legitimacy of European constitutional review even today, it is worth examining these arguments closely (see also Chapter
constitution, the scholar appears to be 'the mouth' of the constitutional court. What is clear is that the relationship between constitutional adjudication and doctrinal activity is pervasively symbiotic. Scholars need an authoritative, 'judicial' interpreter of the constitutional law, to structure, but also to give salience and urgency, to their own activities; and constitutional courts rely heavily on legal scholars to disseminate and explain their decisions to politicians, judges, the
normative discourses. At point A, litigants express (in the form of normative arguments) specific, identifiable socio-political interests, which they hope will be furthered by subsequent constitutional decision-making. At point B, judges co-ordinate socio-political interests and normative structures, by taking policy decisions, but also engaging in constitutional rule-making. At point C, legal scholars represent the law as an autonomous, apolitical, rule system, eliminating as far as possible the
