MOBILE – Mobility Law Open Lab with Alexandra Nouvel

The role of the reporting judge in global mobility cases before the Court of Justice of the EU

Guest presenter: Alexandra Nouvel who is currently finishing her Ph.D. thesis at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Presentation: The reporting judge, or ‘Judge-Rapporteur’ (JR) in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), is a principal if relatively mysterious figure in the production of judgments and law in the European context. By recentering this character, this research aims to propose a different reading of EU case law, from an internal viewpoint and focusing on judges’ work distribution on a procedural and substantial level.

Drawing from mainly US-centered literature, this piece applies legal realism inputs to EU decision-making processes in the realm of mobility. The paper thus looks at the CJEU cases dealing with EU citizenship rights and involving third-country nationals. It so considers the judgments’ presentation of facts, legal framework, and reasoning, as well as variables exogenic to the text such as the formation of the bench and the AG opinion; these factors are then assessed according to the identity of the JR and compared across cases to establish a correlation between the assignment of a JR and the output.

Reviewing the connected area of asylum, which features different judicial actors with some overlaps, controls for the specificity of those findings for citizenship and bridges them to draw a scheme of judges and mobility. Relating to the notion of judicial entrepreneurship, the findings from both case law samples point to the JR’s sway on EU case law in these areas. This linking also allows for an analysis of the Court’s larger discourse on migration and offers a broader conceptualization of judges’ potential impact on jurisprudence while restrained by institutional structures and practices.

Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide an empirical ground to apprehend the role and influence of the reporting judge in the CJEU. The present focus on external mobility stems from a philosophical choice: by reflecting on instances involving individual rights, this paper aims to show the concrete and personal impact of the JR – as the broader goal of this research is to identify driving sources of power within the law and institutions and thereby permit social change, albeit unassumingly.

 Please note that this presentation is adapted from a chapter of Alexandra Nouvel's doctoral thesis, which examines the overall role and influence of the Judge-Rapporteur in the CJEU empirically. Other chapters study the JR from a theoretical, comparative, and normative perspective respectively, through a critical and feminist lens.

Time: 21 March 2024 13:00-14:15

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus + ONLINE

Online participation

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