Responsible judges or judging responsibilities? EU Court of Justice, Bundesverfassungsgericht and EU economic governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT The EU's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has renewed discussions on whether the gap between responsibility and responsiveness is, to some extent, constructed. This discussion only partly applies to courts, which are important in interpreting EU crisis responses. While judges do not rule in a political vacuum, it is not their main task to please public opinion. Even if they were to be influenced by changes in public mood, judges have little incentives to claim responsiveness in their judgments. By contrast, higher courts may be considered the epitome of responsibility since they are themselves bound by the law and entrusted to decide on conflicting responsibility claims of other actors. Hence, we ask how different courts interpret responsibility – their own and that of others – during the Eurozone and the COVID-19 crises. We conduct a comparative analysis of responsibility claims in the jurisprudence of the EU Court of Justice (CoJ) and the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) at two crucial crisis moments. We find little evidence of judges claiming responsiveness, but important differences in the constructions of responsibility between the two courts and across crises. The gap between how the courts construct their shared responsibilities in EU economic governance has seemingly narrowed.