Tommaso Pavone

Book

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Praised as a “profoundly important book,” “a tour de force,” “the most important book on European legal integration in decades,” and winner of seven major social science and law awards, my new book with Cambridge University Press - titled The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics Behind the Judicial Construction of Europe - reveals the concealed politics behind the growing reliance on law and courts to shape policy and resolve political struggles. The European Union (EU) is widely regarded as the exemplar of this “judicialization of politics:" Lacking a European army to coerce compliance or a large bureaucracy to project its authority, the EU governs instead through a transnational judiciary. The conventional wisdom is that activist national judges eagerly joined forces with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to Europeanize domestic policy, bolster their own powers, and propel European integration.

The Ghostwriters challenges this judge-centric narrative and shows how it masks a crucial arena for political action. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that the promise of uniting Europe through law and exercising judicial review was not sufficient to transform national courts into transnational policymakers. National judges broadly resisted empowering themselves with EU law, for they were constrained by excessive workloads, lackluster legal training, and the careerist pressures of their domestic judicial hierarchies. The catalysts of change proved instead to be a group of lesser-known “Euro- lawyers" facing fewer bureaucratic shackles. Under the sheepskin of rights-conscious litigants and activist courts, these World War II survivors pioneered a remarkable repertoire of strategic litigation. They sought clients willing to break national laws conflicting with EU law, lobbied judges about the duty and benefits of upholding EU rules, and propelled them to submit cases to the ECJ by ghostwriting their referrals. Beneath the radar, Europe has to a large extent been built by lawyers who cultivated a transnational legal consciousness and converted state judiciaries into transmission belts linking civil society with supranational institutions.

Yet Euro-lawyering was neither limitless in its influence nor static in its form. Over time, burgeoning networks of corporate law firms displaced the more idealistic pioneers of Euro-lawyering, and the growing politicization of European integration exposed the limits of behind-the-scenes ghostwriting in the absence of vigorous public advocacy. These evolutions profoundly stratified citizens’ access to transnational justice, and they continue to refract the EU’s capacity to govern through law.

By shadowing lawyers who encourage deliberate law-breaking and mobilize courts against their own governments, The Ghostwriters reworks conventional understandings of judicial policymaking, advances a novel narrative of the judicial construction of Europe, and illuminates how the politics of lawyers impact institutional change and transnational governance.

These claims are evaluated through a tripartite framework integrating the satellite view of the transnational using geospatial methods, the granular view of the subnational using 15 months of fieldwork in Italy, France, and Germany, and the temporal view of the past using novel archival evidence. Spatial analyses of a dataset of court referrals to the ECJ are leveraged to reveal “hot spots" and “cold spots" in the judicial enforcement of EU law. Over 350 semi-structured interviews are interpreted to compare why judges resisted Europeanization in some places and how lawyers overcame these resistances elsewhere. Finally, dozens of previously classified court documents combined with oral history interviews are used to retrace lawyers' litigation strategies and the evolution of Euro-lawyering over time.

The book appears as part of Cambridge University Press’ Studies in Law and Society Series. Research for this book project was funded by over $35,000 of competitive grants from the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences Program, the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).

The Ghostwriters has won seven major awards from three different professional associations. It won the 2024 Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law from the American Society of International Law (ASIL), the 2023 C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and politics from the American Political Science Association (APSA), the 2023 European Politics and Society Best Book Award from APSA, and drafts of the manuscript won the 2020 Dissertation Prize from the Law and Society Association (LSA) for best dissertation in socio-legal studies, the Dissertation Award from the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) for best dissertation on the EU written in the prior two years, the 2020 Edward S. Corwin Dissertation Award from APSA for best dissertation in public law, and the Honorable Mention for the 2020 Ernst B. Haas Dissertation Award from APSA for best dissertation in European politics.