Judicial Accountabilities in New Europe: From Rule of Law to Quality of Justice

This volume focuses on a highly challenging aspect of all European democracies, namely the issue of combining guarantees of judicial independence and mechanisms of judicial accountability. It does so by filling the gap in European scholarship between the two policy sectors of enlargement and judicial cooperation and by taking full stock of an interdisciplinary literature, spanning from comparative politics, socio-legal studies and European studies. Judicial Accountabilities in New Europe presents an insightful account of the judicial reforms adopted by new member States to embed the principle of the rule of law in their democratic institutions, along with the guidelines of quality of justice promoted by European institutions in all member States.

Contents: Introduction; Logics of action, hypotheses and impact; European standards of judicial governance; Beyond legal accountabilities: Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic; Highlights and shadows in Bulgaria and Romania; Judicial governance as a mirror of European constitutionalism; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index