Little research exists on how judges enter the Court and how its internal organization affects decision making. This project opens the black box of these decision-making processes to consider governments’ and judges’ strategic behavior.
I show that judges’ performance and governments’ political preferences are intertwined both when judges are appointed and when influence is distributed within the Court.
Judicial appointments to the CJEU
- “Shaping the Bench: The Effect of Ideology, Impact, and Information Quality on Judicial Reappointments” with Daniel Naurin forthcoming in The Journal of Politics
Judicial appointments allow selectors to advance policy goals by appointing influential judges who share their ideological preferences. Under renewable terms, judicial records provide information that helps identify desirable candidates. While prior research focuses on judicial voting, we examine how expectations about judges’ ideology and influence on case law shape reappointments.
Using original data on all potential reappointments to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), we show that secret voting – intended to safeguard judicial independence – fails to shield judges from ideological deselection. However, reappointment levels remain high because governments recognize the need to translate preferences into policies. Peer selection for influential court positions signals who will obtain influence. Holding many such positions, therefore, favors judges’ reappointment, while non-selective processes do not. Our findings challenge the belief that renewable terms weaken judicial independence, showing that selectors trade ideology for influence by relying on peer evaluations for reappointments. A draft version can be found here.
- “How do merit commissions affect judicial behavior? Evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union” with Sivaram Cheruvu, Joshua Fjelstul, and Daniel Naurin presented at APSA 2022 (Montréal)
Governments create monitoring entities to ensure that policymakers are working effectively. Monitors’ control over retaining and selecting policymakers, however, may create incentives that lead to sub-optimal outcomes. One such entity is a merit commission (also known as a judicial council) that evaluates judges subject to retention and (or) selection. How do merit commissions affect judicial behavior? We construct a formal model arguing that lower competence incumbent judges only subject to merit retention will complete cases more quickly at the expense of quality opinion-writing, as their productivity is a signal of their effort investment to the commission. Conversely, judges subject to merit selection and subsequent retention will not make the same tradeoff, as the commission’s initial selection of them makes it more costly for the commission to negatively evaluate them upon retention. We provide evidence leveraging the Article 255 panel for (re)appointments to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Internal organization and decision making
- “Ideology and Agenda Setting on the Court of Justice of European Union: Evidence from Anti-Trust and State Aid Cases” with Erik Voeten presented at the EPSA annual conference 2024 (Cologne)
Can governments influence the ideological direction of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) through judicial appointments? How does the internal allocation of responsibilities, such as the assignment of reporting judges, affect CJEU decisions? These questions have been difficult to answer given that the CJEU publishes its judgments as a collective. We present a simple model in which a reporting judge proposes a draft judgment to a panel, which can then amend and vote on it. The model yields several observable implications, including that both the ideological preferences of the median and the reporting judge influence Court decisions and that the agenda setting power of the reporting judge increases when other judges face higher costs for drafting alternative opinions. We test the implications of the model using annulment cases against EU Commission decisions relating to competition policy brought either by private litigants or governments in the 1990-2021 period. We find that as the median and the reporting judge are appointed by more economically left-wing governments, the Court increasingly rules in favor of government intervention in the economy.
Published work
If who makes decisions within courts matters for the outcome of cases and their reception, then studying how cases and judges are matched is essential to understanding judicial independence.
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“The CJEU Database Platform: Decisions and Decision-Makers” (2023) with Stein Arne Brekke, Joshua Fjelstul and Daniel Naurin. Journal of Law and Courts 11(2), 389-410.
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“Building legitimacy: strategic case allocations in the Court of Justice of the European Union” (2020) Journal of European Public Policy 27 (8), 1215-1235.
