The Rule of Law Crisis Framework
Find out more about our Law Crisis Framework combining legal, empirical, and cultural indicators to assess judicial independence, trust, and integrity across Europe, alongside a Toolkit and Observatory for resilience.
The Framework
Judicial independence in the European Union is facing structural and cultural pressures that, if left unchecked, threaten the Union’s very identity as a community of law (“Rechtsgemeinschaft”[1]). Judicial independence is approached here not merely as a constitutional safeguard, but as a culturally embedded institution situated within Europe’s diverse legal cultures – as a Rechtsstaat, État de droit[2], rule of law. In several Member States, politicised appointments, disciplinary measures, and uneven access to justice are steadily eroding the legitimacy of courts. While existing EU monitoring mechanisms register procedural breaches, they fail to capture the deeper symbolic and cultural dimensions of this decline – the ways in which law is narrated, performed, and believed in by those who apply it and those who rely on it. Therefore, the Rule of Law Crisis Framework integrates, as a qualitative, comparative tool, legal, cultural, and empirical indicators to capture both the formal and symbolic dimensions of judicial independence. Unlike existing monitoring tools, this project examines how independence, impartiality, and integrity are performed and perceived in practice, paying particular attention to mechanisms such as appointments, promotions, disciplinary proceedings, case allocation, and performance[3] evaluation.
[1] See Matthias Herdegen: The European Union as Community of Law, in Werner Gephart/Daniel Witte (eds.): Communities and the(ir) Law [Vol. 31 of the series “Law as Culture”], Frankfurt am Main 2023, p. 215-227.erdegen, The European Union as a cUMOMMUNITY of Law
[2] In recent publications, such as those by Natalia Natsika/Marina Nord and Staffan L. Lindberg (2025): Measuring and Analysing the Rule of Law: A Practical Guide by V-Dem, University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: V-Dem Policy Brief, No. 41, January 2025, pp.1-8.
However, we believe that these distinctions in the concepts of ‘Rechtsstaat’, ‘Rule of Law’ and ‘état de droit’ have been largely abandoned.
[3] See Juliest Onepieter: Law as Performance Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe, Oxford 2022.
Methods
Methodologically, the project combines empirical data from the EU Justice Scoreboard with insights from the Law as Culture paradigm[1], which understands law as a symbolic, ritualistic, and narrative practice intertwined with social values, aesthetic dimensions, and rooted in religious traditions. This beyond the state of the art approach integrates legal, empirical, and cultural perspectives to examine how independence, impartiality, and integrity are both realised and undermined, considering their systemic vulnerabilities as well as intersections with gender, race, and class. The analysis includes implementation deficits, the erosion of public trust in the law[2], and the symbolic disconnection between formal legal systems designed for experts and the everyday legal experiences of laypeople – thus bridging the gap between jurists’ law (Juristenrecht), in the sense of Beseler, and what he called people’s law (Volksrecht).[3]
[1] See the series, Law as Culture/Recht als Kultur, Vol. 1-34, Frankfurt am Main (2010-2023), edited by Werner Gephart.
[2] See for example, Renata Uitz: The Rule of Law in the EU: Crisis, Differentiation, Conditionality, in: European Papers, Vol. 7, 2022, pp. 929-948.
[3] See Georg Beseler: Volksrecht und Juristenrecht, Leipzig 1848; see also Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Vol. Recht, historisch-kritische Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, p. 444 (ed. by Werner Gephart/Siegfried Hermes, Tübingen 2010); see also Werner Gephart: Law, Culture, and Society. Max Weber’s Comparative Cultural Sociology of Law [Vol. 7 of the series “Law as Culture”], Frankfurt am Main 2015.
Alongside the Framework, the project will produce a Judicial Cultures Toolkit, providing institutions with practical methods for self-assessment and resilience-building, and will establish a European Observatory on Judicial Cultures to ensure that data, analysis, and policy recommendations continue beyond the project’s funding period and to extend the EU’s capacity to protect judicial independence into the cultural domain. The connection between the rule of law, independence of justice, legal certainty, and trust in the judiciary, and against the backdrop of a diversity of legal cultures in a European crisis of law, should be understood more clearly in theoretical terms. The point of this approach is to not respond with political measures alone or with economic strategies[1] to reinforce rule of law, but rather to draw on cultural and communal resources and impulses because the reasons for the crisis in law are grounded in the cultural and the communal sphere.[2]
[1] In this direction, see Anna Södersten and Edwin Hercock (eds.): The Rule of Law in the EU: Crisis and Solutions, Report No. 1op, Published by the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies, April 2023.
[2] For a fundamental analysis of why we actually need law, see Jacques Commaille: À quoi nous sert le droit, Paris 2016.
Our Scientific Advisory Board
Kontakt
Ryszard Bobrowicz