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

该项目分析了国际组织在缺乏财政和军事能力来执行其权威时如何推进法治。该项目要求：法律的文化是如何产生的，以至于法律虽然是在遥远的地方创造的，但却成为社区成员援引的地方资源，并在法庭上例行地得到证明？将“纸面法律”转化为实际行动对所有法律的体系都至关重要，但对于缺乏军队、独立税收体系和庞大官僚机构的联邦分权政体来说，这是一个特殊的挑战。这种政治可能依赖律师、法官、法律的学者和公民协会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。重点放在欧洲联盟（欧盟）-现代最成功的国际组织之一-并使用跨一组欧洲城市的法律的专业人士如何组织实践欧盟法律的比较历史分析，该项目审查了不同的动机，组织实践，以及这些行为者所面临的体制限制：当地的社会经济背景如何塑造他们援引欧盟法律的动机？他们如何提高对欧盟法律的认识，并积累财政资源在法庭上维护它？国内司法机构的组织如何塑造他们有效保障当地公民欧盟权利的能力？由此产生的研究结果支持比较研究变量摄取的法律的规则在联邦政体，欧盟和美国之间的比较是特别合适的。也就是说，通过分析法律的规则如何被当地的法律的专业人士实践，该项目确定了在多样化和分散的法律的系统中，个人权利和法律平等适用的各种方式。初步研究已经充分利用地理信息系统技术和实地考察，在意大利城市，以表明，当地参与欧盟在城市一级的变化;额外的实地考察将评估这种变化的机制和普遍性的调查结果，以国家的司法机构组织。有鉴于此，本项目首先利用地理编码的欧盟诉讼数据，选择意大利城市，在那里可以进行额外的档案工作和关键的法律的从业者采访，以探讨他们如何理解欧盟法律，什么地方支持欧盟诉讼存在，是否有不同的地方“风格”的欧盟法律的做法已经结晶，以及如何随着时间的推移，这些做法演变。实地工作将评估这样一种假设，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调动物质资源在法庭上为这些规则辩护的能力，确立了不同的城市一级参与欧盟法律的模式。为此，将把意大利北方城市的欧盟诉讼与南方城市的欧盟诉讼进行比较，意大利北方城市长期以来一直拥有丰富的资源和大型律师事务所的诉讼支持结构，南方城市最近才成立了促进欧盟法律的实践的机构，以培训那里的许多独立执业者。实地考察还将确定地方，州和欧盟行为者如何塑造参与欧盟法律的体系所需的当地诉讼支持结构。然后，以确定是否意大利的模式与欧盟法律的次国家参与延伸到不同的司法系统，额外的档案工作和采访中选择的法国城市-嵌入在一个更集中的司法等级比意大利的-和德国城市-嵌入在一个更分散的司法比意大利的-将进行。

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.