A presentation by Daniel Naurin (University of Gothenburg). This event is part of the EU Governance colloquium.
We argue that when states delegate powers to international courts, they face a trade-off between political control and judicial performance. Although limiting a court's discretion might sometimes be necessary to guard against undesirable judicial actions, imposing too many political checks and balances can also hamper the court's ability to pursue desirable judicial actions as well. We explain how the member states of the European Union have used the Court of Justice's structure and process to grant themselves political representation on the bench, and show statistically how their desire for ex ante control has impaired the court's production of case law. Specifically, using an original dataset with detailed information on all of the Court of Justice's judgments between 1952 and 2018, we find that as the level of ideological conflict among the states that were responsible for appointing the court's judges increases, so too does the expected duration of the court's legal procedures. In additional to shedding new light on the internal operations of one of the most powerful international courts in the world, the findings also have implications for advancing theories of delegation and judicial design more broadly.
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