On regular bases, the Court of Justice of the European Union has been accused of being activist. However, the very nature of the European Union and the great complexity and diversity of the...Show moreOn regular bases, the Court of Justice of the European Union has been accused of being activist. However, the very nature of the European Union and the great complexity and diversity of the European Court of Justice’s case law imply that judicial activism in itself may mean different things. First used and widespread in the United States, the term was rapidly taken for granted and applied to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Yet, the notion of judicial activism has been extensively used by scholars and judges but its meaning has become more and more ambiguous. As American Judge Frank H. Easterbrook already put in 2002 “Everyone scorns judicial “activism”, that notoriously slippery term” (2002: 1402). In fact, too often employed to explain a number of different, even contradictory, concepts, it has become increasingly risky to use it. This thesis does neither aim to provide a single and specific definition of the notion of judicial activism nor to bring a completely new approach to the term. Its purpose is rather to collect a wide body of scholarship, to gather the most top-cited theories, to link them to case law and other literature. Then, the objective is to create a typology of judicial activism to make it easier for the reader to understand and for the scholars to convey their theories more adequately.Show less
