Transnational Elite Self-Empowerment and Judicial Supremacy. Reply to Conor Gearty’s review of Transnational Networks and Elite Self-Empowerment : The Making of the Judiciary in Contemporary Europe and Beyond (OUP 2018)

This note is in reply to a review of my monograph Transnational Networks and Elite Self-Empowerment: The Making of the Judiciary in Contemporary Europe and Beyond (OUP 2018) by LSE Professor Conor Gearty, Vice-President of the British Academy titled The Courts in Europe Today: Subverting or Saving Democracy? published in European Constitutional Law Review 16 (2021) https://cup.org/2KcqRKi . I would like to express my gratitude to the British Academy for sponsoring the research underlying my monograph and to Prof. Gearty for reviewing it at such length. He is enviably qualified to draw on first-hand observation as a human rights lawyer to critique my reasoning and make the opposite case with passion. I will address his subtle blend of praise and blame for the sake of advancing our understanding of latent questions of the institutional Judiciary, its design and designers, which have not garnered the scholarly attention that many recent events urge. I hope my rebuttal may rise to the challenge of being commensurately incisive in the pursuit of the truth which we both seek, and that readers might discern a synthesis emerging which could supersede each of our contributions