This chapter contends that colonial-era rules permeated EEC development cooperation through the European Development Fund. But more importantly, it shows that with personnel transitions from colonial to European administrations, a colonial attitude towards legal compliance was transferred within the European Commission.

While the field of European law scholarship has long maintained a form of ‘colonial amnesia’, this chapter considers the growing literature that has emerged over the past few years studying the entanglements between European law projects and (post)colonialism. The chapter first suggests a new analytical framework to assess these ‘entanglements’ and ‘continuities’ by looking at three ‘carriers of continuity’ in the law: biographies of multiple-positioned lawyers; forms of legal knowledge; institutions and professions in the European field of law. As it looks at European law projects from the margins and peripheries, this new stream of research can transform our understanding of European law which looks less like the ‘cathedral’ often praised by scholars and more like a complex ‘archipelago’, the legal borders and principles of which are uncertain and unequal.

In this chapter, we rely upon two experiments to demonstrate that the public withdraws acceptance of executive actions implemented through contravention – over the objection of a court – but only if that court has a high level of judicial independence. But, if executives contravene a low independence court, it is as if the court had not acted: there is no difference in the public’s level of acceptance. Additionally, we find no evidence in any of our quartet of countries that judicial approval improves the public’s acceptance of an executive’s policy. Contrary to fears that citizens may blindly follow courts and adjust their opinions based on a court’s ruling, we find no evidence that even widely-respected courts are able to increase citizens’ support for an executive action by endorsing it.

In this chapter, we examine how both variation in levels of judicial independence and in the partisanship of litigants affects citizens’ willingness to punish executives who ignore courts. We again test the partisanship-centered account against our theoretical framework. Leveraging the presence of abstract review in Germany, Poland, and Hungary, we demonstrate that judicial independence continues to be a prerequisite to judicial efficacy, even with the appearance of a discernible influence from partisanship. Our results in this chapter suggest that judicial review holds the promise – at least where courts have high levels of judicial independence – to constrain executives even in contexts where partisanship is heightened.

In this chapter, we examine the effects of judicial review across citizens. We find that, when courts enjoy high levels of judicial independence, their rulings’ efficacy is amplified among citizens who have a strong regard for the rule of law; when citizens have low levels of support for the rule of law, the effect of a court’s ruling is muted. For courts that lack judicial independence, even those citizens who hold the rule of law in the highest regard are unaffected by a court’s determination that that an executive’s behavior is unconstitutional. Additionally, we explain how the efficacy of judicial review varies based on the public’s approval of the executive whose policy the court reviews. Notably, we find that the public opinion constraint on executives comes from their supporters, not their opponents. These findings point to an important implication: political sympathy for the executive may not necessarily be the Achilles heel of judicial efficacy it is often portrayed to be.

This chapter ties together our theory and analyses to draw general conclusions and to chart the path for future research. We discuss the implications of our findings for the broad set of research areas we engage, including theories of judicial independence, models of executive unilateral action, and the relationship between the rule of law and democratic entrenchment. We highlight strengths and weaknesses of our findings and research design and suggest paths for other scholars to move this research forward. We see many additional opportunities to interrogate our theory and its implications in other places, on other issues, and in other settings to facilitate a broader understanding of when and how courts are efficacious.

This chapter presents our research design. First, in recognition of our theory’s emphasis on judicial independence, we select four cases – the United States, Germany, Hungary, and Poland – that vary in their levels of judicial independence but share important political, legal, and socio-economic characteristics. We use surveys of elites and the public to demonstrate that variation in judicial independence is observed by experts and citizens alike. Second, the chapter establishes the crucial role the COVID-19 pandemic plays in our research design. The global pandemic presented a unique and fleeting opportunity to probe citizens’ reactions to rule-of-law violations because it produced real threats to the rule of law in ways that were felt simultaneously and similarly around the world. Third, we discuss the benefits of using survey experiments for a study like ours. Finally, we introduce the four countries in detail, describing their general political characteristics, the institutional characteristics of their constitutional courts, and their handling of the pandemic.