Judges too wise for own good?
iCourts invite to a lecture with Antoine Vauchez.
At a time when European democracies are going through an unprecedented crisis and far-right parties are progressively coming to power, the courts are more than ever in a position to be the first safeguards and guarantors of our rights and freedoms. But are our judges really protecting us? Are they truly ready and equipped to assume such a role? What is their understanding of the current democratic emergency? Drawing on extensive legal and sociological research and scholarship, Hennette-Vauchez & Vauchez’s book undertakes an investigation into those French courts who judge of the State and its public policies: the Council of State (Conseil d’Etat) and the Constitutional Council (Conseil constitutionnel). By taking a historical detour that shows their embeddedness at the heart of a Fifth Republic primarily concerned with guaranteeing the power to executive branch, the book shows how these two courts – both of which sit at the Palais-Royal – have let their guard down as they let themselves be enlisted in the major turning points of public policies – from the great European market to the security turn. Have they not, indeed, accompanied rather than limited the implementation of the two (anti-terrorist and sanitary) lengthy states of emergency proclaimed and applied in France since 2015? Do they not play a decisive role in keeping anti-discrimination law at bay and in ratifying the rise of economic freedoms?
By examining the legal policies of the two supreme courts on the most pressing challenges of our democratic societies – the ecological emergency, demands for equality within a pluralistic society, and the preservation of spaces for contestation and dissent – the book shows that they diminish, even obscure, the dynamics of rights and thereby participate in the crisis of confidence and legitimacy in our democracies.