Organized interests and legal mobilization in the European courts network

Project Description

The project aims to answer the question under which premises, with which purposes and in which form organized interests make use of the legal system. Through key words such as "juridification", "legal mobilization" and "strategic litigation", extensive literature at the intersection of Law and Political Science deals with the question, under which conditions and with which consequences the law is resorted to to influence political decisions. The extant literature should be complemented with respect to three aspects. First, the project adopts a comparative approach to actors that includes not just associations and NGOs, but also private companies, which have been so far only rarely considered in such studies. Second, it pays particular attention to the significance that the appeal to EU laws and constitutional laws has in combination with a strategy of judicial lobbying. Third, and connected to this, the project investigates which consequences for the strategic action of organized interests result from the structure of the European judicial network.
In this judicial and jurisprudential network there are, besides the fundamental rights anchored in the national constitution through the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the European Convention on Human Rights, other fundamental rights catalogues, from which individuals and organizations can derive right claims and with the help of which they can claim fundamental rights violations.
At the same time, several autonomous but entangled supreme courts  – in the case of Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court, the European Court of Justice as well as the European Court of Human Rights – coexist. These have different standards to analyze rights violations alleged by individuals and organizations and thereby open up possibilities of conducting court cases strategically.
Moreover - especially concerning the conduct of public authority - national specialized courts are agents of the implementation and enforcement of EU law. In cases in which it comes to the interpretation of EU law, this opens up the way for organized interests to the European Court of Justice.
The project makes use of a mixed methods design. In a first step, the project will analyze through explorative interviews with representatives of 30 organizations which intentions, purposes and organization-internal assessments are behind the mobilization of the law and which situational, contextual factors influence the strategic considerations. In a second step, a survey of about 2000 organizations with their base in Germany will be realized. The survey should provide insights about the previous experiences of legal disputes, the organization's internal resources and decision-making processes and the relative importance of legal action for the mediation of interests. Through an actor-centered perspective on the phenomenon of legal mobilization, which combines qualitative and quantitative research approaches, the project bridges a gap between interest groups research and the interdisciplinary research on law and politics and provides new insights on the mechanisms of legal mobilization in the context of democratic lobbying.