The Taciturn (European) Court: the Walls of Judicial Silence and their Intended and Unintended Effects

The paper will discuss the conditions under which the European judges exercise their important and far reaching powers. It will focuses on three sub-themes: the Court’s extensive interpretations of Union competences beyond the treaties and their authors’ texts and concrete intentions, its frequent poor reasoning and the complete non-transparency of the judges’, and its majorities’ Willensbildung. The paper will discuss the measures that seal the outside world off from authentic insights into the Court’s internal decisional culture(s). In view of the Court’s complete silence the paper lecture's method will be to examine the available bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence that can possibly shed some light on why the judges prefer to operate their law-saying and law-making business behind virtually impenetrable walls of concealment. Hjalte Rasmussen has held the chair of European Union Law at the Law Faculty of the University of Copenhagen since 1993. Formerly he served as a professor of EU Law at the Copenhagen School of Business and a visiting professor at l’Université Aix-Marseille III (CERIC; 2007); the College of Europe at Bruges (1987-1992) and of the Institute of Public Administration at Maastricht (1984-1990). In 1986 be published his doctoral thesis entitled “On Law and Policy in the European Court of Justice. A Comparative Study in Judicial Policymaking” (Nijhoff, Dordrecht, Holland, 1986).