Who enforces EU law? Trust, legislative design, and legal mobilization in the EU judicial system

Abstract

The European Union’s legal system rests on an unusual combination of decentralization and integration. EU law is interpreted authoritatively by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), yet its effectiveness depends on a broad set of actors beyond the Court itself: national judges, legislators, legal professionals, and citizens. Enforcement, cooperation, and compliance emerge from their interaction rather than from hierarchy alone. This panel brings together research that examines how trust, access, and institutional design shape legal mobilization and judicial decision making in the EU. As centralized enforcement by EU institutions has become more selective, enforcement has increasingly relied on decentralized and privatized mechanisms through preliminary references, a procedure through which national judges consult the CJEU on the correct interpretation of EU law in specific domestic court cases. In this context, legislative choices about rights, remedies, and procedural access shape whether and how private actors can activate enforcement from below through national litigation. These legislative design choices have lasting consequences for patterns of litigation and for the role of EU courts in governance. Trust is also a precondition for effective judicial cooperation, and ultimately CJEU authority. Mutual trust between national courts and the CJEU – and transitive trust across Member States - underpins key mechanisms such as mutual recognition and preliminary references. Yet recent developments have exposed the fragility of these assumptions. Democratic backsliding, rule-of-law conflicts, and episodes of judicial defiance raise pressing questions about how trust is built, sustained, mediated, and contested within a multilevel legal order. Finally, the panel highlights the role of legal professionals and publics in translating formal rules into legal outcomes. Citizens’ perceptions of judicial performance condition the legitimacy of EU intervention in rule-of-law disputes, while lawyers’ embeddedness in judicial networks influences litigation dynamics and outcomes. Together, these perspectives underscore that EU judicial governance is not driven by legal doctrine alone, but by the interaction of institutions, actors, and social expectations. By integrating analyses of trust, enforcement design, legal mobilization, and professional practice, this panel offers a comprehensive account of how EU law operates in practice—and why the resilience of the EU legal system varies across time, policy areas, and political contexts.

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