Search

Over the past several decades, associations of ?Judges for Democracy? (JFD) have emerged and united across the civil law world with the explicitly political mission of promoting respect for human rights and democratic values. Given that judges in civil law systems have long been trained to eschew all political commitments, to function simply as ?la bouche de la loi,? this is a rather surprising development. Even in common law systems, including the highly rights-focused United States, judges tend to shroud or deny the political nature of their work. What conditions have permitted or prompted judges in civil law countries to organize in this explicitly political manner? What kinds of activities have they engaged in and with what, if any, effects on law and politics? And how does their existence and their experience speak to debates on the relationship between the judicial role, the rule of law, and democracy? In this paper, I offer initial responses to these questions based on preliminary research on the Italian and Spanish associations: Magistratura Democratica and Jueces para la Democracia. The paper represents a first and very tentative cut at making sense of the JFD phenomenon, which I intend to study much more extensively in the months and years to come. It thus provides a basic (and still incomplete) narrative account of the emergence and activities of the Italian and Spanish JFD, and only very tentative conclusions about their meaning for theoretical debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]