Pablo José Castillo Ortiz

Paths to the recognition of homo-parental adoptive rights in the EU-27: a QCA analysis

ABSTRACT Although the recognition of the adoptive rights of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) couples is a socially salient topic, cross-national variation regarding this issue has been largely underexplored in social science research. With the aid of configurational analysis, this article fills this gap and shows the conditions that explain the recognition of the adoptive rights of homosexual couples in the countries of the EU-27. It is argued that two different paths led to this outcome. All countries where adoptive rights were recognized had higher degrees of secularization and lower levels of social homophobia. In addition, in Northern European countries, the Protestant background and absence of conservative governments for a certain time period seemed to be the determinant. However, for the remaining European countries that recognized these rights, rising levels of gender equality appeared to have a more salient role.

The Political De-determination of Legal Rules and the Contested Meaning of the ‘No Bailout’ Clause

Traditional debates on legal theory have devoted a great deal of attention to the question of the determinacy of legal rules. With the aid of social sciences and linguistics, this article suggests ...Traditional debates on legal theory have devoted a great deal of attention to the question of the determinacy of legal rules. With the aid of social sciences and linguistics, this article suggests a way out of the ‘determinate–indeterminate’ dichotomy that has dominated the academic debate on the topic so far. Instead, a dynamic approach is proposed, in which rules are deemed to undergo processes of political ‘de-determination’ and ‘redetermination’. To illustrate this, the article uses the example of Article 125 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the ‘no bailout’ provision, which played a major role in the management of the Euro-crisis. As will be shown, with the start of the crisis, this provision, whose meaning was once scarcely controversial, became the object of intense interpretative disagreement. As it became politically relevant, the rule also became the site of interpretative competitions, until the intervention of the European Court of Justice disambiguated and redefined its meaning.

Councils of the Judiciary and Judges’ Perceptions of Respect to Their Independence in Europe

Councils of the Judiciary have spread in Europe under the assumption that they contribute to a central aspect of the Rule of Law: the independence of courts and judges under their authority. However, a recent survey of the European Network of Councils of the Judiciary showed that, in some countries, there are significant groups of judges that perceive their Judicial Council as disrespectful of their autonomy. While in countries such as Denmark or Belgium judicial distrust of the Council seems to be anecdotal, in other countries such as Spain a striking 36 per cent of respondent judges had such negative views of the institution. With the aid of multi-value Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this paper explains the causes of this paradoxical phenomenon. It is argued that judges hold such negative opinions of Councils of the Judiciary as the result of the interaction between institutional, political and socio-legal conditions: the range of powers of the Councils, their control by political elites and interest groups, and the degree of judicial corruption.

Framing the Court. Political Reactions to the Ruling on the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Catalan Parliament

This article analyses the reactions by political actors to the ruling of the Spanish Constitutional Court on the Declaration of Sovereignty of the Catalan parliament. It is suggested that political framings of the ruling can be classified into the legalist, attitudinal and institutional academic models of judicial behaviour. As will be shown, these models have a normative dimension, with implications for the ideal of the rule of law. These implications are skilfully captured and exploited by political actors as part of a wider battle for the framing of the ruling. The rule of law thus becomes politicised as a result of the tension around the judicialisation of the so-called Catalan ‘sovereignist process’.