Trust and Courts

Abstract

This panel builds on the keynote session “Trust in Governance and Regulation in Europe” and focuses on trust and courts. Trust in and between courts is a topic that has traditionally been underexplored by trust researchers in the governance and regulation literature. During the keynote session Juan Mayoral will reflect on key findings of the TiGRE project from the perspective of his research on trust and courts. He will also explore how those findings could play a role in his ERC project CURIAFIDES “The relevance of judicial (dis-)trust for the legal integration of the European Union”. In this panel Mayoral will elaborate more on the CURIAFIDES project. According to Mayoral, recent scholarly and policy debates underline the relevance of trust-enhancing solutions in addressing some of the current challenges facing the EU legal system: specifically that of judicial defiance of national courts to the authority of the Court of Justice of the EU. These concerns have been aggravated in the context of democratic and rule of law backsliding in Hungary and Poland, which have raised serious doubts about the correct application of EU law within a network of thousands of national courts. In this context, it is essential to get a better understanding on the following questions: what is trust between judges? Which factors make judges trust other judges? What are the implications of judicial trust for cooperation in multi-level systems? The CURIAFIDES project is still in a very early stage, but Mayoral will set the scene and trigger an important debate on trust between courts/judges. Apart from trust between courts/judges, recently also research in courts as part of regulatory regimes has been emerging. In the context of the TiGRE project comparative survey data have been collected related to three sectors: the financial, food and data protection sector. Monika Glavina describes and provides a preliminary analysis of the TiGRE results related to courts. The principle of mutual trust is a principle of EU law developed by the Court of Justice of the EU. It is a fundamental principle that has shaped EU internal market law and cooperation between national authorities in for instance criminal law enforcement. Interestingly, the case-law of the Court of Justice on mutual trust has not drawn on findings from the trust literature. Esther van Zimmeren proposes some lessons that can be drawn from the trust literature for the EU principle of mutual trust based on a co-authored paper (Popelier, Gentile, van Zimmeren, 2022).