MOBILE - Mobility Law Open Lab with Eftychia Constantinou

Crisis Jurisprudence: The Legal Characteristics, Doctrinal Contours, and Political Implications of the Citizenship Jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Times of a Political Crisis

Abstract

As the EU transitioned from an integration euphoria into an era of crisis, the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (Court) interpretation of European citizenship underwent a metamorphosis. The literature has offered several alternative explanations for the Court’s jurisprudential shift, yet its precise characteristics and doctrinal contours remain unpacked. Notably, the political implications of citizenship cases delivered against a background of a political crisis are underplayed. On the one hand, accounts solely focusing on headline cases such as Pringle and Wightman and Others fail to capture the Court’s true contribution to the political process during the Financial Crisis and Brexit. On the other hand, traditional accounts on judicial politics fall short in explaining how the Court can navigate the politically turbulent tides of recent years and contribute to the political process beyond advancing European integration.

Against this backdrop, the thesis seeks to deduce an empirically grounded understanding of the interplay between legal interpretation and political crises in the Court’s citizenship jurisprudence. The main question asks whether the Court has fashioned a Crisis Jurisprudence through its interpretation of citizenship provisions during a political crisis, precisely during the Financial Crisis and Brexit. The thesis develops the novel concept of ‘Crisis Jurisprudence’, which denotes a line of cases delivered against a background of a political crisis in which the Court departs, beyond the expected jurisprudential ebb and flows, from the established line of cases. Cases which form part of the ‘Crisis Jurisprudence’ are characterised by a change in outcomes mirroring the evolution of the crisis at hand, and a modification in the Court’s use of established judicial tools. The thesis investigates whether the Court’s use of citations, the choice of legal basis and the timing of judgments delivered against a background of a crisis is observably different from before and strategic.

In approaching the question, a long-term, quantitative, empirical study is combined with a qualitative, contextually embedded analysis. The empirical enquiry extracts data on outcomes, citations, legal basis and duration of proceedings from all 177 judgments delivered by the Court on citizenship until 2022. Original data on the political matrix surrounding the delivery of citizenship judgments is collected by matching the decision date to key political events such as the Brexit referendum, and European Council meetings.  The analysis in systematically examining the outcomes, citations, legal basis and decision dates of citizenship judgments unveils a Crisis Jurisprudence. The findings also suggests that citation practices, legal basis and delivery date of judgments could be conceived as context motivated tools as they enable the Court to calibrate its judgments to the political context and enhance the political shadow of judgments.

During this seminar Eftychia Constantinou will briefly introduce my research project and sketch out the preliminary findings.

Speaker bio

Eftychia Constantinou is a fourth-year PhD researcher at the European University Institute (EUI, Florence). Her research empirically unpacks the interplay between the political context and judicial behaviour by focusing on the citizenship jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union in times of crisis. Her research interests include the fields of law and politics, European citizenship, judicial decision making and empirical legal methods.

She holds a Bachelor of Laws in Law with First Class Honours from King’s College London (2020). She also obtained a LL.M. in in Comparative, European and International Laws from the EUI (2021). Parallel to her PhD, she worked as a research assistant for the EUI and for the IUROPA network.

Online participation

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