Doctoral Dissertation Research: Translating Rules and the Rule of Law into Local Practices

本项目分析国际组织在缺乏财政和军事能力来执行其权威的情况下如何推进法治。该项目提出的问题是：法律文化是如何形成的，从而使法律虽然是在遥远的地方创造出来的，但却成为社区成员援引的一种地方资源，并在法庭上经常得到证实？将“纸面法律”转化为实际行动对所有法律体系都至关重要，但对于缺乏军队、独立税收体系和庞大官僚机构的联邦分散政体来说，这是一个特别的挑战。这种政策可能依靠律师、法官、法律学者和公民协会组成的社区来维持法律在当地的运作，特别是在大多数法院和诉讼当事人所在的城市。着眼于欧盟（EU）——现代最成功的国际组织之一——并使用一组欧洲城市的法律专业人士如何组织实施欧盟法的比较历史分析，该项目考察了这些行动者所面临的不同动机、组织实践和制度约束：当地社会经济背景如何塑造他们援引欧盟法的动机？他们如何提高对欧盟法律的认识，并筹集财政资源，在法庭上为欧盟法律辩护？国内司法机构的组织如何塑造他们有效保障当地公民的欧盟权利的能力？由此产生的结果支持对联邦政策中法律规则的可变吸收进行比较研究，其中欧盟和美国之间的比较特别合适。也就是说，通过分析当地法律专业人员社区如何实施法律规则，该项目确定了在多样化和分散化的法律制度中保障个人权利和平等适用法律的各种方式。通过12个月的实地调查，我们将结合采访、档案和定量证据来回答这些问题。初步研究已经利用地理信息系统技术和意大利城市的实地调查，表明当地与欧盟的接触在城市层面有所不同；进一步的实地工作将评估造成这种差异的机制，并将调查结果推广到司法机构组织不同的国家。有鉴于此，该项目首先利用地理编码的欧盟诉讼数据来选择意大利城市，在那里可以进行额外的档案工作，并采访关键的法律从业人员，以探讨他们如何理解欧盟法律，当地对欧盟诉讼的支持是什么，欧盟法律实践的独特当地“风格”是否已经形成，以及这些实践如何随着时间的推移而演变。实地考察将评估一种假设，即地方机构（如大学和律师协会）根据其传播欧盟规则意识和动员物质资源在法庭上为其辩护的能力，巩固了与欧盟法律接触的独特城市层面模式。为此，意大利北部城市的欧盟诉讼——长期以来以资源丰富、大型律师事务所的诉讼支持结构而自豪——将与南部城市的欧盟诉讼进行比较，南部城市促进欧盟法律实践的机构直到最近才成立，以培训那里的许多独立从业者。实地考察还将确定地方、州和欧盟参与者如何塑造参与欧盟法律体系所需的当地诉讼支持结构。然后，为了确定意大利地方参与欧盟法律的模式是否延伸到不同的司法系统，将在选定的法国城市进行额外的档案工作和访谈，这些城市的司法等级比意大利更集中，而德国城市的司法等级比意大利更分散。

This project analyzes how international organizations advance the rule of law when they lack the financial and military capacity to enforce their authority. The project asks: How do legal cultures emerge so that law, though distantly created, becomes a local resource invoked by community members and routinely vindicated in court? Translating 'paper laws' into behavior on the ground is critical for all legal systems, but it is a particular challenge for federal, decentralized polities that lacks a military, an independent tax system, and a large bureaucracy. Such polities might rely on communities of lawyers, judges, legal academics, and civic associations to sustain the local operation of the law, particularly in cities, where most courts and litigants are located. Focusing on the European Union (EU) -- one of the most successful international organizations of the modern era -- and using a comparative historical analysis of how legal professionals across a set of European cities have organized to practice EU law, the project examines the diverse motives, organizational practices, and institutional constraints faced by these actors: How does local socio-economic context shape their motivations to invoke EU law? How do they promote awareness of EU law and amass the financial resources to vindicate it in court? And how does the organization of the domestic judiciary shape their ability to effectively secure the EU rights of local citizens? The resulting findings support comparative research into the variable uptake of legal rules in federal polities, where comparisons between the EU and the United States are particularly appropriate. That is, by analyzing how legal rules come to be practiced by local communities of legal professionals, the project identifies the various ways in which individual rights and the equal application of the law can be secured in diverse and decentralized legal systems.A combination of interview, archival, and quantitative evidence, amassed via twelve months of fieldwork, will be leveraged to answer these questions. Preliminary research has already leveraged GIS technology and fieldwork in Italian cities to demonstrate that local engagement with EU varies at the city-level; additional fieldwork will assess the mechanisms underlying this variation and the generalizability of the findings to countries with diversely organized judiciaries. In this light, this project first leverages geocoded EU litigation data to select Italian cities where additional archival work can be conducted and key legal practitioners interviewed to probe how they understand EU law, what local supports exist for EU litigation, whether distinct local 'styles' of EU legal practice have crystallized, and how these practices evolve over time. Fieldwork will assess the hypothesis that local institutions -- such as universities and lawyers' associations -- entrench distinct city-level patterns of engagement with EU law depending on their ability to diffuse awareness of EU rules and to mobilize the material resources to vindicate them in court. To do so, EU litigation in northern Italian cities -- long boasting resource-rich, large-law-firm litigation support structures -- will be compared to EU litigation in southern cities, where institutions promoting EU legal practice have only recently been founded to train the many solo-practitioners there. Fieldwork will also identify how local, state, and EU actors shape the local litigation support structure necessary to participate in the EU legal system. To then determine whether Italian patterns of subnational engagement with EU law extend to different judicial systems, additional archival work and interviews in select French cities -- embedded within a more centralized judicial hierarchy than Italy's -- and German cities -- embedded within a more decentralized judiciary than Italy's -- will be conducted.