A Europeanized judiciary? Explaining national judges’ perceptions of their role as EU law judges

Membership in the EU entails new powers and duties for national judges, i.e. they are expected to act as “decentralized EU law judges”. This entails fulfilling a range of EU law related tasks such as upholding the supremacy of EU law; ensuring direct effect of EU law, interpreting national law in conformity with EU law; requesting a preliminary ruling from the CJEU when the resolution of a national legal dispute requires it and, in some situations, applying EU law ex officio. However, a number of studies show that the reality of the application of EU law in national disputes is much different from what the EU legal order expects of judges when they are wearing the EU law wig (Nowak et al. 2011; Mayoral, Jaremba, and Nowak 2014; Glavina 2020; Coughlan 2012; Lampach and Dyevre 2019). Although we know quite a lot about cross-national and cross-court variations regarding the application of EU law (both inside and outside of the preliminary ruling procedure) and how this is affected by the fact that national judges feel to belong to the EU judiciary, very little is known on how national judges perceive themselves as European Union law judges and what factors may play a role in that respect. This paper addresses these questions and, most importantly, explores under which conditions national judges see themselves as European Union law judges. The paper is based on the large-scale survey covering judges from three old and three new EU member states: Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Slovenia and Croatia. We look at how different individual- (age, seniority, EU law knowledge, EU law experience, judicial trust), court- (court instance, court type, workload) and county-level factors (length of EU membership) affect the extent to which national judges perceive themselves as European Union law judges.