Category: Judicial Power

 

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”

This is a transcript of the oral presentation with which I introduced my paper for the conference The EU Court of Justice as a Relational Actor organised by Anna Wallerman Ghavanini at the University of Gothenburg, 16-17 December 2021. I was unable to attend personally, but the organisers kindly made arrangements for online participation. Thanks for having me. I will later develop the paper itself for publication. Thanks also to my discussant Erik Björling and my fellow participants for their encouraging and valuable comments.

Continue reading “The Court of Justice of the European Union as a media actor”

In my inaugural lecture from May 2017 (introduced in Finnish here), I tried to argue for a slightly modified notion of judicial power. Section 99 of the Constitution of Finland (731/1999) seems to understand a ‘separated’ judicial power as not much more than the courts’ exclusive duty and right to ‘administer justice’, that is, to apply the law in individual cases. This deceptively clear-cut definition was recently reduplicated in Article 3 of the Courts Act (673/2016) which, in turn, makes a direct reference to the powers of the judiciary as they are defined in the Constitution. There is little about the courts’ role in the general control of the constitutionality of the activities of the political branches, although Section 106 of the Constitution did specifically create a new duty for the courts to abstain from applying primary legislation that is ‘in evident conflict’ with the constitution. The Finnish tradition of constitutional review has traditionally emphasised the role of parliamentary preview preferring a more restraint understanding of judicial power.

Continue reading “The power of a ‘relatively activist’ judiciary”