European Engagement of National Courts: A View From Central Europe Ten Years After Enlargement

This paper investigates the degree to which Hungarian and Slovenian judges are active actors in the European judicial arena and participate through transnational networking in the elaboration of common understandings in three core legal areas: competition, immigration/asylum and labour law. It also examines the impact at the national level of transnational judicial engagement. Networking activities represent indeed a significant device of a European judicial community in the making encapsulated within a broader European legal field. Assessing the degree of judicial involvement, and its impact at the national level may corroborate or rather invalidate the functionality of networks as Europeanization devices in the presence of specific conditions (“descending dimension”) – and not only as informal channels of dialogue with European institutions and the CJEU in particular at the upper, European level (“ascending dimension”). Adopting a socio-legal perspective, the paper resorts to both quantitative analysis and qualitative research interviews with relevant actors