A growing body of scholarship suggests that some of the most iconic rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) were the result of “legal mobilization”, i.e. the strategic use of the law to promote political or societal change. To what extent the history of European integration was, in fact, one of legal mobilization? This is what this conference seeks to determine, by combining quantitative and qualitative methods, doctrinal analysis, and archival research.
Every EU Law student is familiar with the landmark ruling in Costa v. ENEL, where the ECJ enunciated the primacy of Community law in domestic legal orders. Far from being an extraordinary development of an ordinary dispute over an unpaid electricity bill, that ruling was, in fact, the final step of a carefully-constructed lawsuit, designed to challenge the Italian electricity nationalization bill at the height of the Cold War. Thus, Costa v. ENEL can be regarded as one of the earliest examples of mobilization of EU law via the preliminary ruling procedure.
Looking at the ECJ case law through the lenses of legal mobilization entails pushing EU law scholars outside their comfort zone. Indeed, this type of analysis requires asking questions such as: who initiated the judicial proceedings? What political or societal change did they pursue? What was their historical, political, and social context? Traditional doctrinal methods can hardly help answer these questions. Instead, archival and empirical research can shed a new light even on the classics of EU law.
In this spirit, the MobEL Conference will draw on insights from different disciplines and methods to contribute to the debate on the mobilization of EU law. Three panels will address the following questions: how have legal mobilization processes shaped the early dynamics of European integration (panel 1)? What was the role of (Euro)lawyers in these processes, especially competition, corporate, and pro-bono lawyers (panel 2)? How are new legal mobilization actors, such as NGOs and civil society groups, changing the dynamics of strategic litigation before the ECJ (panel 3)?
Convenors: Amedeo Arena (University of Naples Federico II | European University Institute); Mario Pagano (European University Institute); Virginia Passalacqua (Utrecht University)
Photo: The Palais Building of the Court of Justice. © European Union - Source: European Parliament