Category: Research

This paper discusses how the the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) responds to calls for institutional transparency by issuing media artefacts that it produces itself as an independent media actor. The paper hypothesises that the CJEU’s judicial communication, i.e. the production of artefacts such as press releases, is a factual (i.e. non-legal) dimension of judicial power that can potentially strengthen the authority of the Court both within the institutional architecture of the EU and in relation to civil society more generally. The paper then proceeds to discuss the framework of transparency and openness that regulates the CJEU’s information and communication obligations and how the Court responds to those obligations. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with the Court’s media officers in the spring of 2023, the paper concludes that a multi-layered and ‘incoherent’ regulatory framework provides the CJEU with a flexible toolbox with which it can legitimise a ‘managed openness’ that may be considerably more restricted than what the EU’s fundamental values and basic principles on institutional transparency require. Continue reading “Judicial media power? Transparency and communication at the CJEU (ECPR 2024)”

This is a presentation that I gave online to my colleagues at a Warwick Law School staff seminar in early March 2022. Most legal theorists will know German legal historian Cornelia Vismann (1961–1980) as an innovative and observant interpreter of continental philosophy, most notably of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Legendre. Vismann’s numerous contributions to the development of so-called German media theory are, however, hardly known among her Anglophone legal peers. Legal theory’s apparent lack of engagements with German media theory is even more surprising if one considers that Vismann’s breakthrough monograph was translated into English as Files: Law and Media Technology (Stanford UP, 2008). This presentation attempts to outline the beginnings of a materialist and anti-hermeneutic framework that is indebted to Vismann as well as to her media theory collaborators. It discusses judicial artefacts such as courthouse designs as cultural techniques, that is, as chains of operations that link together humans, things and media. Continue reading “Cornelia Vismann and the cultural techniques of law”