Paper Titles & Abstracts

In my contribution I will present the proceedings and the main findings of the research project "National Judges as EU Judges" in short. This research identified how EU law is applied by national courts in the EU member states by asking national judges about their views with regard to the application of EU law. The research project focused on judges of private law courts of lower instance in the Netherlands and the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. A comparison between Dutch and German judges makes it possible to consider the extent to which experiences with European law are stipulated by the specific characteristics of a national legal system. The project was set up with the aim to study the experiences of national judges with EU law, the way in which national judges are informed about developments in EU law and the way in which they look upon the influence of EU law in a traditionally national area of law, private law, and to contrast the results with the EU law expectations. Three factors are identified which arguably influence the above described function of national judges: experiences, knowledge and attitudes. It was asked how the application of EU law by national judges is influenced by (a) (negative or positive) experiences with applying EU law within national legal systems (b) problems concerning knowledge of (researching) EU law and/or (c) underlying attitudes of national judges towards their role as decentralised EU courts.