The European Court and Civil Society: Litigation, Mobilization and Governance. By Rachel Cichowski. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xv+294. $85.00 cloth; $32.99 paper; $26.00 e-book.

Abstract

The European Court and Civil Society: Litigation, Mobilization and Governance. By Rachel Cichowski. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xv+294. $85.00 cloth; $32.99 paper; $26.00 e-book. An exemplary addition to a growing interdisciplinary body of literature on the European Union (EU) legal system, The European Court and Civil Society explains an international treaty governing economic cooperation became a quasi-constitutional polity granting individual rights and public inclusion (p. 1). Accounts of how this transformation came about have been previously proffered but none as nuanced as Cichowski's empirically driven explanation. The study provides new and important insights into the role of civil society litigation and mobilization in spurring institutional change and supranational governance. The first chapters lay out the theoretical, empirical, and normative debates with which the book engages and develops the theoretical approach applied in subsequent chapters. Cichowski's theoretical contribution is powerful: existing scholarship on European legal integration has been dominated by the increasingly stagnant debate between intergovernmental approaches, which argue that national governments' policy preferences systematically influence judicial decisions and neo-functional approaches, which focus on the role of supranational institutions and transnational society. The study, by exploring the interactions between individual activists, law and courts and the impact of this dynamic on governance (p. 244), transcends this debate and is able to draw conclusions about the causes, effects, and feedback effects of supranational governance, mobilization, and litigation. The heuristic device that the study develops is used to evaluate whether, how, and why integration has evolved in specific policy domains: questions that have not been satisfactorily answered by the existing theoretical approaches. Part I explores the dynamic process of institutionalization through litigation by focusing on legal mobilization in the gender equality and environmental protection policy domains. The cases were strategically chosen to allow for a comparison of the effect of the legal basis-treaty-based rights (gender equality) versus rights enshrined only in secondary legislation (environmental protection)-on judicial rulemaking capacity and the ease with which member state governments can retaliate against adverse rulings. Part II switches focus and takes mobilization as the starting point of analysis. It argues that national executives are no longer alone in the European arena; public interests are equally present. Focusing on the same policy domains, Cichowski finds that litigation and legislation provide new political and legal opportunities, prompting individuals and groups to shift their mobilization to the emerging supranational space. A formidable strength of the book is the robust methodology that combines quantitative analyses across 15 countries from 1970 to 2003 in the two policy domains with detailed, lively, and systematic case law analysis and a historical study of the mobilization dynamic at the European level. …