Thursday, April 14, 2016
Assembly D (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
This article showcases how local institutions shape the decentralized enforcement of political authority via an analysis of the subnational litigation of European Union (EU) law in Italy. I argue that when location-specific institutions effectively (1) diffuse information and (2) mobilize resources to support litigation, the practice of EU law should vary spatially according to the relevance of EU provisions to local socioeconomic needs and vary temporally via a process of legal reception, clarification and contestation, and settlement. Conversely, when local institutions fail to fulfill these two functions, EU law risks either being underlitigated, entrenching an EU "law desert," or being overlitigated, engendering an EU "legal battlefield." After theorizing when such deviations are most likely, I assess the argument through a comparative case study of divergent patterns of EU litigation across northern and southern Italy. By combining a geocoded dataset of all cases referred to the EU’s European Court of Justice (ECJ) by Italian courts with semi-structured interviews of Italian legal professionals, I find strong empirical support for the proposed theory.
