The relevance of judicial (dis-)trust for the legal integration of the European Union

The functioning of the European Union (EU) legal system is ensured through an intricate interdependent and non-hierarchical judicialsystem, where judges at the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and national courts must rely on the willing cooperation with each otherto enforce decisions on EU law matters. Scholars have pointed to the relevance of legal, historical, sociological and political factors inexplaining why courts cooperate within the EU judicial system. However, recent scholarly and policy debates underline the relevanceof trust-enhancing solutions in addressing some of the current challenges facing the EU legal system: specifically that of judicialdefiance of national courts to the authority of the CJEU. These concerns have been aggravated in the context of democratic and ruleof law backsliding in Hungary and Poland, which have raised serious doubts about the correct application of EU law within a networkof thousands of national courts. Despite this incipient interest, we still lack adequate theorising about the truly sociological andrelational nature of this phenomenon, which is crucial for the development of a more fine-grained account of inter-judicial relationsand for answering: what is trust between judges? Which factors make judges trust other judges? What are the implications of judicialtrust for cooperation in multi-level systems? The CURIAFIDES project is an interdisciplinary and ground-breaking research project,aiming at investigating the relevance of trust between judges for the cooperation and, subsequently, the legal integration of the EU.The project will articulate a novel socio-legal theory of judicial trust within the EU, which will be based on strong empirical evidencecollected from experiments, surveys, and interviews with CJEU and national judges. The purpose of which being is to define andexplain judicial trust and its impact on judicial cooperation, which ties into a broader aim of offering new policy and legal solutions.