Doctoral Dissertation Research: Translating Rules and the Rule of Law into Local Practices

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

This project analyzes how international organizations advance the rule of law when they lack the financial and military capacity to enforce their authority. The project asks: How do legal cultures emerge so that law, though distantly created, becomes a local resource invoked by community members and routinely vindicated in court? Translating 'paper laws' into behavior on the ground is critical for all legal systems, but it is a particular challenge for federal, decentralized polities that lacks a military, an independent tax system, and a large bureaucracy. Such polities might rely on communities of lawyers, judges, legal academics, and civic associations to sustain the local operation of the law, particularly in cities, where most courts and litigants are located. Focusing on the European Union (EU) -- one of the most successful international organizations of the modern era -- and using a comparative historical analysis of how legal professionals across a set of European cities have organized to practice EU law, the project examines the diverse motives, organizational practices, and institutional constraints faced by these actors: How does local socio-economic context shape their motivations to invoke EU law? How do they promote awareness of EU law and amass the financial resources to vindicate it in court? And how does the organization of the domestic judiciary shape their ability to effectively secure the EU rights of local citizens? The resulting findings support comparative research into the variable uptake of legal rules in federal polities, where comparisons between the EU and the United States are particularly appropriate. That is, by analyzing how legal rules come to be practiced by local communities of legal professionals, the project identifies the various ways in which individual rights and the equal application of the law can be secured in diverse and decentralized legal systems. A combination of interview, archival, and quantitative evidence, amassed via twelve months of fieldwork, will be leveraged to answer these questions. Preliminary research has already leveraged GIS technology and fieldwork in Italian cities to demonstrate that local engagement with EU varies at the city-level; additional fieldwork will assess the mechanisms underlying this variation and the generalizability of the findings to countries with diversely organized judiciaries. In this light, this project first leverages geocoded EU litigation data to select Italian cities where additional archival work can be conducted and key legal practitioners interviewed to probe how they understand EU law, what local supports exist for EU litigation, whether distinct local 'styles' of EU legal practice have crystallized, and how these practices evolve over time. Fieldwork will assess the hypothesis that local institutions -- such as universities and lawyers' associations -- entrench distinct city-level patterns of engagement with EU law depending on their ability to diffuse awareness of EU rules and to mobilize the material resources to vindicate them in court. To do so, EU litigation in northern Italian cities -- long boasting resource-rich, large-law-firm litigation support structures -- will be compared to EU litigation in southern cities, where institutions promoting EU legal practice have only recently been founded to train the many solo-practitioners there. Fieldwork will also identify how local, state, and EU actors shape the local litigation support structure necessary to participate in the EU legal system. To then determine whether Italian patterns of subnational engagement with EU law extend to different judicial systems, additional archival work and interviews in select French cities -- embedded within a more centralized judicial hierarchy than Italy's -- and German cities -- embedded within a more decentralized judiciary than Italy's -- will be conducted.