Project Details
Projekt
Judicial conflict and the reconfiguration of control in the EU constitutional order
Applicant
Ana Bobic, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Public Law
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532657320
The main premise of this project is that the EU as a system is subject to transformations that result from conflicts between national and supranational judiciary. They compete in their claims to control the competence to regulate and implement EU law. From the perspective of competence-control theory, the Court of Justice as the governor granted to national courts the competence to enforce EU law. The Court of Justice controls this competence through the preliminary reference procedure and the final say to interpret EU law. National courts are perfect intermediaries based on their expertise, their legitimacy, and their operational capacity. National courts contest that setup and want to turn their own competence of enforcement back into control. Yet, because Member States are diverse in terms of their constitutional and judicial systems, this contestation manifests itself in different ways. A crucial area in which the dilemma of competence-control in the EU constitution plays out is criminal law. Traditionally a core state power, it is witnessing a slow but steady rise of EU’s regulatory capacities. Yet, mutual recognition in criminal matters raised a new set of issues for fundamental rights protection and mutual trust between the Member States. That background created a regulatory need at the EU level, with the Court of Justice assuming its role of the governor and extending the enforcement role to national courts as intermediaries. In a nutshell, this is a study of the tensions inherent in the shifts of control in vertical power-sharing in the judicial realm. Thus, the project will provide insights on how judicial conflict over control produces the transformation of the EU constitutional order. To do so, this project will do two things. First, it will explore the varieties of constitutional setups on the national level, the position and role of judicial review, and its development throughout the process of EU integration. In so doing, it will theorise the ‘constitutional backgrounds’ of Member States to be able to assess their position as intermediaries and their respective responses to control by the Court of Justice as the governor. Second, the project will investigate how national courts contest their competence as intermediaries and instead seek to reclaim control from the Court of Justice. As a result, it will be possible to observe how national claims to control influence the activities of the Court of Justice and produce changes in the EU’s constitutional frame. This will provide an empirical demonstration of the variety of ways in which judicial conflicts over control manifest themselves due to the diversity of national systems within the EU.
DFG Programme
Research Units
