Subjects:

EU Law

Contents:

1. Introduction

PART I: THE THREE COURTS - RAW ANALYSIS

2. The French Bifurcation

3. The American Unification

4. The European Union: Discursive Bifurcation Revisited

PART II: BIFURCATION

5. Similarity and Difference

6. France: How is the discursive bifurcation maintained?

7. The ECJ: The French bifurcation reworked

PART III: COMPARISON

8. The Sliding Scales

9. Apples and Oranges

10. On Judicial Transparency, Control, and Accountability

11. On Judicial Debate, Deliberation, and Legitimacy

12. Concluding Postscript

Bibliography

Judicial Deliberations compares how and why the European Court of Justice, the French Cour de cassation and the US Supreme Court offer different approaches for generating judicial accountability and control, judicial debate and deliberation, and ultimately judicial legitimacy. Examining the judicial argumentation of the United States Supreme Court and of the French Cour de cassation, the book first reorders the traditional comparative understanding of the difference between French civil law and American common law judicial decision-making. It then uses this analysis to offer the first detailed comparative examination of the interpretive practice of the European Court of Justice. Lasser demonstrates that the French judicial system rests on a particularly unified institutional and ideological framework founded on explicitly republican notions of meritocracy and managerial expertise. Law-making per se may be limited to the legislature; but significant judicial normative administration is entrusted to State selected, trained, and sanctioned elites who are policed internally through hierarchical institutional structures. The American judicial system, by contrast, deploys a more particip