"Between law and politics: Taking the law seriously in rationalist models of judicial autonomy in the EU"

Beach, Derek. (2001) "Between law and politics: Taking the law seriously in rationalist models of judicial autonomy in the EU" . In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 2001 (7th), May 31-June 2, 2001, pages 40, Madison, Wisconsin.

Abstract

The argument in this paper will proceed in four steps. First, the state of theorizing on supranational autonomy and the ECJ will first be briefly reviewed in section 2, discussing the weakness of existing approaches. These problems lead to the development of a modified theoretical model in section 3, which incorporates a normative dimension of law into a rational institutionalist model, while also detaining the distinctive characteristics of judicial institutions: in effect an attempt to take ‘the law’ seriously. Clear testable hypotheses are then derived from the model, and put to a tentative test in section 4 on a sample of several key cases from the 1990s, where the utility of the modified theory is demonstrated.