‘In This Bureaucratie Silence EU Law Dies’: Fieldwork and the (Non)-Practice of EU Law in National Courts

The chapter argues that fieldwork-specifically multi-sited, semi-structured interviews and participant observation-is uniquely suited for unpacking how the constraints of daily practice within national courts frustrate the subnational reach of the European Union’s (EU) legal authority. Deriving methodological insights and practical lessons from fifteen months of fieldwork in Italian, French, and German courts, the author shows how fieldwork reveals judges to be neither solely driven by individual attitudes nor by strategic quests for power: they are also employees within a bureaucracy. Anchored by the demands of established practice, knowledge, and everyday work, judges can develop an institutionally rooted consciousness resisting disruptive confrontations with new and unfamiliar rules like EU law. Through on-site iteration and triangulation, field researchers can trace, unpack, and corroborate this consciousness in real time, with an eye to also hypothesizing the conditions under which resistances to Europeanizing change can be overcome. In so doing, the researcher can intercept what one judge referred to as a ‘bureaucratic silence’ within which EU law ‘dies’: A web of habitual institutional practices scarcely detectable via other modes of social inquiry.