Phelan on The Promise of Judicial Biography for the Study of the European Court of Justice @tcddublin

William Phelan, Trinity College, Dublin, has published The Promise of Judicial Biography for the Study of the European Court of Justice. Here is the abstract.

This chapter sets out the promise of judicial biography for research on European Union law, with a particular emphasis on historical research on the birth and early development of the European legal order. It demonstrates that there has been little engagement with the biography of the judges of the Court of Justice in previous scholarship, whether in law, social science, or history. It argues that explanations for behaviour of the Court of Justice often rely on implicit assumptions about the personalities and goals of the judges who make up the Court’s decision-makers. It demonstrates how drawing on the materials of judicial biography can improve our understanding of the texts of the Court’s famous judgments, of the politics of appointments and removals from the Court, and of the Court’s relationship with national constitutional courts. It concludes with a detailed agenda for future research, including explicit testing of legal, social science, and historical claims about the Court’s behaviour against available materials relating to judicial biography, as well as an intensification of data gathering on the lives, activities, and legal commitments of its early judges.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.