Author Interview: The Mimetic Evolution of the Court of Justice of the EU: A Comparative Law Perspective

Leonardo Pierdominici

University of Bologna Law School

Tell us a little bit about the book  

This book aims to offer new perspectives in the legal study of the Court of Justice of the European Union (‘CJEU’), by reversing some traditional ones.

In the multidisciplinary field of European studies, the Court of Justice has mainly been analysed because of its central role in the process of continental integration: i.e. the centrality of the Court and its case-law for the evolution of the EU legal order. Moreover, the CJEU has been traditionally studied by specialists for its important role as an agent of comparative law: i.e., as the quintessential example of a supranational court which is a natural user of comparative material and comparative analysis of law.

On the opposite, my idea is to study the evolution of the Court itself, more than the impressive evolution of the EU legal order in its judge-made dimension. I am not much concerned with the evolution of case law, jurisprudence, or the interpretative activity of the CJEU – this is the background of my research, but it is already a widely studied area. On the contrary, I am much more concerned with the structure and the organization of the Court itself as an institution: I do so by looking at several aspects of its structure and organization, selected and constructed as a complete range of symptomatic figures of judicial institutionalisation.

Secondly, my idea is to conduct an institutional analysis of the Court through a comparative analysis: not a review of the comparative method employed by the Court’s judges, rather an explanation of how the development and institutional evolution of the CJEU happened by a selective internalization of comparative influences. I argue that this happened in such a way that its development and institutional evolution can be considered mimetic: able to engage and somehow internalize the solicitations which came from EU Member States, influences of different legal traditions, and responding to global challenges concerning the increasing role of the international forms of judicial review and of the international judicial review bodies.

In sum, I look at the comparative influences in the Court’s institutional evolution.

What inspired you to take up this project?  

The book is a revised version of my PhD dissertation discussed at the European University Institute in Florence some years ago. The project was the natural product of my background as a comparative lawyer along with the incredible in-depth analysis in European studies that the EUI can offer.

I started to reflect on classic topics such as the role of the CJEU in the EU construction and its use of comparative law, and my curiosity for the collateral institutional aspects came out naturally.

Then, I was lucky enough to meet some great scholars (in Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Ann Arbor) who engage with both comparative and EU law - a particularly fruitful combination - and they offered me guidance along the way.

Whose work was influential on you throughout the course of the project?

What made my research interesting from a personal point of view was the challenge of confronting comparative constitutional and EU law literature. I had the pleasure to read masterful works in both domains. A list of those would be almost impossible.

But I took particular inspiration from the insights of those early scholars in EU legal studies who (again) naturally based their research, in the first decades, on the comparison with national laws and the influence of those in the supranational construction. Some examples are: Eric Stein, Nicola Catalano, Jean Rivero, Tim Koopmans, Donald Graham Valentine, Federico Mancini, Pierre Pescatore. In this respect, I notice that the authors I constantly follow nowadays use the same method: Joseph Weiler, Bruno de Witte, Miguel Maduro, Daniel Halberstam, Eleanor Sharpston, Giulio Itzcovich, Giuseppe Martinico, François-Xavier Millet, Vlad Perju, Oreste Pollicino, Daniel Sarmiento, to name a few.

Another great inspiration came from those scholars who are currently engaging with a new critical historiographic reading of the EU law evolution: for instance Francesca Bignami, Fernanda Nicola, Tommaso Pavone, Morten Rasmussen and Antoine Vauchez. They are natural comparatists as well!

What challenges did you face in writing the book?

As the book is a composite analysis of different aspects of institutional evolution, the main challenge in writing it was to preserve coherence throughout, but I enjoyed this challenge as challenges of this kind make our job fascinating, after all!

A second problem was accessibility: to overcome this, I tried to talk to both EU law specialists and comparative law scholars, and this forced me to choose a jargon that might be suitable for both

On a more practical level, the book was based on my PhD thesis, so I faced the typical challenge of transforming it by rethinking its structure, reducing its length, strengthening the analytical parts etc. The editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan was of great help in this respect.

What do you hope to see as the book's contribution to academic discourse and constitutional or public law more broadly? 

One can say that EU law and comparative constitutional law flourished in the same decades but grew as increasingly distinct disciplines. As mentioned earlier, some great scholars help in keeping the two strands of research interconnected - as they should be. I hope to offer a humble contribution in the same direction.

What's next? 

I am currently working on various projects: the main ones are driven by the same inspirations. Methodologically and substantially, I will follow similar paths by looking at the new European economic governance and its impact on the national settings, and by investigating the historical evolutions of other EU institutions and their comparative influences.

Dr. Leonardo Pierdominici is a researcher at Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna Law School