Seminar: Empirical assessment of Judicial Activism on the European Court of Justice

Iyiola Solanke will present a paper on the extent to which the European Court of Justice can still be considered a monolithic institution with ´runaway´ potential. Using a sociolegal analysis the paper uses empirical data gathered during interviews with the ECJ’s Advocates General in order to disaggregate the ECJ and gain an understanding of activism within it. She concludes that the court cannot be considered an activist institution per se and that consequently understandings of its decisions need to be less unitary and more nuanced.

About Iyiola Solanke

Iyiola Solanke is a senior Lecturer at Leeds University Law School, where she teaches European Union Law, Discrimination Law and Competition Law. She completed her doctorate at the LSE Law Department, where she was also appointed a Teaching Fellow. More recently, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School and a visiting professor at Wake Forest University Law School. Her research focuses on European institutions and governance, in particular the European Court of Justice and Discrimination Law. She recently received a British Academy Research Grant for an empirical project on the Advocate General in the European Court of Justice, and last year published 'Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law' (2009, Routledge). Her articles have appeared in the Modern Law Review and the Columbia Journal of European Law. She is currently writing a textbook on EU law (Pearson 2012) and organising an international research collaboration on racism, colonialism and law under the auspices of the Law and Society Association.