Tommaso Pavone
Biographic Data
| ID | 1124541 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tommaso Pavone |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tommaso |
| FAMILY NAME | Pavone |
| SIGNATURE | PAVONE T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1921-7528 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Democratic Frontsliding in the European Union: The Problem of Autocratic Enclaves and the Case for Restorative Disobedience
After countless warnings of a democratic recession, there are glimmers of democratic renewal, especially in the European Union. As an illiberal government in Poland was voted out of office, policymakers began debating how to restore liberal democracy and what role the EU should play. We answer by theorizing “democratic frontsliding” – the piecemeal restoration of liberal democratic institutions and practices after a period of democratic erosion –…
Follow the leader: The European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the EU's rule of law revolution
The autocratization of Hungary and Poland prompted a revolution in the European Court of Justice (ECJ)'s caselaw. Brick by brick, the ECJ imposed novel obligations on EU member states to safeguard the rule of law while expanding the legal bases for the EU to sanction governments breaching the Union's fundamental values. In this article, we ask whether the ECJ pioneered this rule of law revolution or, conversely, whether the Court responded to an …
Leveling and Spotlighting: How the European Court of Justice Favors the Weak to Promote Its Legitimacy
As private actors turn to international courts (ICs), we argue that judges can adopt pro-individual rights agendas to promote their own legitimacy. By leveling the odds for disempowered individuals and spotlighting their rights claims, ICs rebut charges that they are playthings of the powerful and cultivate support networks in civil society. We assess our theory by scrutinizing the first IC with private access: the European Court of Justice (ECJ)…
Lawyering in Hard Places: Comparative Dispatches from the Margins of Legality
What do Lawyers do when Legality Unravels?Lawyering is nowhere easy, but in liberal democracies governed by the rule of law, we know what effective lawyers look like: part of an independent bar, these professionals keep clients within the bounds of the law, persuade judges to win disputes in court, and promote the public interest via pro bono work.But not all lawyers find themselves in such favorable contexts.What of lawyers working in hard place…
Is the EU’s rule of law crisis a byproduct of dissensus and disunion
Where Have the Guardians Gone? Law Enforcement and the Politics of Supranational Forbearance in the European Union
Why would a supranational law enforcer suddenly refrain from wielding its powers? The authors theorize the supranational politics of forbearance—the deliberate underenforcement of the law—and explain how they arise from cross-pressures between prosecutorial discretion and intergovernmental policy-making. The article then traces why an exemplary supranational enforcer—the European Commission—became reluctant to launch infringements against Europea…
The Shadow Effect of Courts: Judicial Review and the Politics of Preemptive Reform
We challenge the prevalent claim that courts can only influence policy by adjudicating disputes. Instead, we theorize the shadow effect of courts : policy makers preemptively altering policies in anticipation of possible judicial review. While American studies imply that preemptive reforms hinge on litigious interest groups pressuring policy makers who support judicial review, we advance a comparative theory that flips these presumptions. In less…
The rhetoric of inaction: Failing to fail forward in the EU’s rule of law crisis
In the EU, political crises often serve as catalysts for policymaking and ‘failing forward’. Yet as a breakdown of the rule of law has swept some member states, EU institutions have repeatedly failed to react. We argue that this outcome is partly tied to how political elites strategically mobilize rhetoric to legitimate stasis during crises. Building on theories of rhetorical action and discursive institutionalism, we rectify their bias for chang…
Lawyers, judges, and the obstinate state: The French case and an agenda for comparative politics
EU Law Stories: Contextual and Critical Histories of European Jurisprudence
In the shadow of multiple crises afflicting the EU in recent years, the contributors to this richly textured volume found themselves shaken by a sense of “existential crisis articulated in EU law scholarship.”1 This perception is not only attributable to EU law’s uncertain fortune as a subject of study in American academia, but also to the growing number of legal scholars questioning the very “raison d’être of the project of European integration.…
From Marx to Market: Lawyers, European Law, and the Contentious Transformation of the Port of Genoa
What happens when international courts are asked to tackle local political controversies and their judgments subsequently spark contentious resistance? In the European Union (EU), scholars have posited that the politicization of the often-liberalizing rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) provokes Euroscepticism and noncompliance. In contrast, I argue that contentious politics may also produce permissive conditions for activist “Eurolawy…
Revisiting Judicial Empowerment in the European Union: Limits of Empowerment, Logics of Resistance
Judicial empowerment is often cited as a driver of transnational governance, particularly in the European Union. In this view, lower national courts enthusiastically began referring cases to the European Court of Justice to acquire new powers of judicial review. Revisiting this argument, I argue that path dependent, everyday practices within domestic judiciaries stemming from insufficient training in European Union law, workload pressures, and cu…
The Political Geography of Legal Integration: Visualizing Institutional Change in the European Union
How are processes of political development structured across space and time by preexisting institutions? This article develops a spatiotemporal theory of institutional change by analyzing the evolving infrastructural power of the European Union's legal order using geospatial methods. Specifically, the authors theorize that the pattern and pace of the domestic spread of EU law has been shaped by preexisting state institutions—particularly by the d…
Mapping European law
This article constitutes the first systematic effort to promote a spatial and a subnational turn in the study of EU legal integration by demonstrating how geospatial methods and the selection of a subnational unit of analysis can improve our understanding of the use of the preliminary reference procedure. We conduct a theory-testing case study leveraging an original dataset of all references submitted by Italian courts from 1964 through 2013 and …
The rhetoric of inaction: Failing to fail forward in the EU’s rule of law crisis
In the EU, political crises often serve as catalysts for policymaking and ‘failing forward’. Yet as a breakdown of the rule of law has swept some member states, EU institutions have repeatedly failed to react. We argue that this outcome is partly tied to how political elites strategically mobilize rhetoric to legitimate stasis during crises. Building on theories of rhetorical action and discursive institutionalism, we rectify their bias for chang…
Where Have the Guardians Gone? Law Enforcement and the Politics of Supranational Forbearance in the European Union
Why would a supranational law enforcer suddenly refrain from wielding its powers? The authors theorize the supranational politics of forbearance—the deliberate underenforcement of the law—and explain how they arise from cross-pressures between prosecutorial discretion and intergovernmental policy-making. The article then traces why an exemplary supranational enforcer—the European Commission—became reluctant to launch infringements against Europea…
The Political Geography of Legal Integration: Visualizing Institutional Change in the European Union
How are processes of political development structured across space and time by preexisting institutions? This article develops a spatiotemporal theory of institutional change by analyzing the evolving infrastructural power of the European Union's legal order using geospatial methods. Specifically, the authors theorize that the pattern and pace of the domestic spread of EU law has been shaped by preexisting state institutions—particularly by the d…
The Shadow Effect of Courts: Judicial Review and the Politics of Preemptive Reform
We challenge the prevalent claim that courts can only influence policy by adjudicating disputes. Instead, we theorize the shadow effect of courts : policy makers preemptively altering policies in anticipation of possible judicial review. While American studies imply that preemptive reforms hinge on litigious interest groups pressuring policy makers who support judicial review, we advance a comparative theory that flips these presumptions. In less…
Mapping European law
This article constitutes the first systematic effort to promote a spatial and a subnational turn in the study of EU legal integration by demonstrating how geospatial methods and the selection of a subnational unit of analysis can improve our understanding of the use of the preliminary reference procedure. We conduct a theory-testing case study leveraging an original dataset of all references submitted by Italian courts from 1964 through 2013 and …
Follow the leader: The European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the EU's rule of law revolution
The autocratization of Hungary and Poland prompted a revolution in the European Court of Justice (ECJ)'s caselaw. Brick by brick, the ECJ imposed novel obligations on EU member states to safeguard the rule of law while expanding the legal bases for the EU to sanction governments breaching the Union's fundamental values. In this article, we ask whether the ECJ pioneered this rule of law revolution or, conversely, whether the Court responded to an …
From Marx to Market: Lawyers, European Law, and the Contentious Transformation of the Port of Genoa
What happens when international courts are asked to tackle local political controversies and their judgments subsequently spark contentious resistance? In the European Union (EU), scholars have posited that the politicization of the often-liberalizing rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) provokes Euroscepticism and noncompliance. In contrast, I argue that contentious politics may also produce permissive conditions for activist “Eurolawy…
Is the EU’s rule of law crisis a byproduct of dissensus and disunion
Revisiting Judicial Empowerment in the European Union: Limits of Empowerment, Logics of Resistance
Judicial empowerment is often cited as a driver of transnational governance, particularly in the European Union. In this view, lower national courts enthusiastically began referring cases to the European Court of Justice to acquire new powers of judicial review. Revisiting this argument, I argue that path dependent, everyday practices within domestic judiciaries stemming from insufficient training in European Union law, workload pressures, and cu…
Mapping European law
This article constitutes the first systematic effort to promote a spatial and a subnational turn in the study of EU legal integration by demonstrating how geospatial methods and the selection of a subnational unit of analysis can improve our understanding of the use of the preliminary reference procedure. We conduct a theory-testing case study leveraging an original dataset of all references submitted by Italian courts from 1964 through 2013 and …
Revisiting Judicial Empowerment in the European Union: Limits of Empowerment, Logics of Resistance
Judicial empowerment is often cited as a driver of transnational governance, particularly in the European Union. In this view, lower national courts enthusiastically began referring cases to the European Court of Justice to acquire new powers of judicial review. Revisiting this argument, I argue that path dependent, everyday practices within domestic judiciaries stemming from insufficient training in European Union law, workload pressures, and cu…
The Political Geography of Legal Integration: Visualizing Institutional Change in the European Union
How are processes of political development structured across space and time by preexisting institutions? This article develops a spatiotemporal theory of institutional change by analyzing the evolving infrastructural power of the European Union's legal order using geospatial methods. Specifically, the authors theorize that the pattern and pace of the domestic spread of EU law has been shaped by preexisting state institutions—particularly by the d…
EU Law Stories: Contextual and Critical Histories of European Jurisprudence
In the shadow of multiple crises afflicting the EU in recent years, the contributors to this richly textured volume found themselves shaken by a sense of “existential crisis articulated in EU law scholarship.”1 This perception is not only attributable to EU law’s uncertain fortune as a subject of study in American academia, but also to the growing number of legal scholars questioning the very “raison d’être of the project of European integration.…
From Marx to Market: Lawyers, European Law, and the Contentious Transformation of the Port of Genoa
What happens when international courts are asked to tackle local political controversies and their judgments subsequently spark contentious resistance? In the European Union (EU), scholars have posited that the politicization of the often-liberalizing rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) provokes Euroscepticism and noncompliance. In contrast, I argue that contentious politics may also produce permissive conditions for activist “Eurolawy…
Lawyers, judges, and the obstinate state: The French case and an agenda for comparative politics
The Shadow Effect of Courts: Judicial Review and the Politics of Preemptive Reform
We challenge the prevalent claim that courts can only influence policy by adjudicating disputes. Instead, we theorize the shadow effect of courts : policy makers preemptively altering policies in anticipation of possible judicial review. While American studies imply that preemptive reforms hinge on litigious interest groups pressuring policy makers who support judicial review, we advance a comparative theory that flips these presumptions. In less…
The rhetoric of inaction: Failing to fail forward in the EU’s rule of law crisis
In the EU, political crises often serve as catalysts for policymaking and ‘failing forward’. Yet as a breakdown of the rule of law has swept some member states, EU institutions have repeatedly failed to react. We argue that this outcome is partly tied to how political elites strategically mobilize rhetoric to legitimate stasis during crises. Building on theories of rhetorical action and discursive institutionalism, we rectify their bias for chang…
Where Have the Guardians Gone? Law Enforcement and the Politics of Supranational Forbearance in the European Union
Why would a supranational law enforcer suddenly refrain from wielding its powers? The authors theorize the supranational politics of forbearance—the deliberate underenforcement of the law—and explain how they arise from cross-pressures between prosecutorial discretion and intergovernmental policy-making. The article then traces why an exemplary supranational enforcer—the European Commission—became reluctant to launch infringements against Europea…
Lawyering in Hard Places: Comparative Dispatches from the Margins of Legality
What do Lawyers do when Legality Unravels?Lawyering is nowhere easy, but in liberal democracies governed by the rule of law, we know what effective lawyers look like: part of an independent bar, these professionals keep clients within the bounds of the law, persuade judges to win disputes in court, and promote the public interest via pro bono work.But not all lawyers find themselves in such favorable contexts.What of lawyers working in hard place…
Is the EU’s rule of law crisis a byproduct of dissensus and disunion
Democratic Frontsliding in the European Union: The Problem of Autocratic Enclaves and the Case for Restorative Disobedience
After countless warnings of a democratic recession, there are glimmers of democratic renewal, especially in the European Union. As an illiberal government in Poland was voted out of office, policymakers began debating how to restore liberal democracy and what role the EU should play. We answer by theorizing “democratic frontsliding” – the piecemeal restoration of liberal democratic institutions and practices after a period of democratic erosion –…
Follow the leader: The European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the EU's rule of law revolution
The autocratization of Hungary and Poland prompted a revolution in the European Court of Justice (ECJ)'s caselaw. Brick by brick, the ECJ imposed novel obligations on EU member states to safeguard the rule of law while expanding the legal bases for the EU to sanction governments breaching the Union's fundamental values. In this article, we ask whether the ECJ pioneered this rule of law revolution or, conversely, whether the Court responded to an …
Leveling and Spotlighting: How the European Court of Justice Favors the Weak to Promote Its Legitimacy
As private actors turn to international courts (ICs), we argue that judges can adopt pro-individual rights agendas to promote their own legitimacy. By leveling the odds for disempowered individuals and spotlighting their rights claims, ICs rebut charges that they are playthings of the powerful and cultivate support networks in civil society. We assess our theory by scrutinizing the first IC with private access: the European Court of Justice (ECJ)…
Political science (13 works) · Law (12 works) · European and International Law Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · European union (6 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (6 works) · International trade (6 works) · Sociology (6 works)