Single Review on past events

Maria Daniela Poli is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg affiliated with the Department of Law.

The starting point of her talk entitled "'Babel of Courts' or 'Courts for Babel'?" is the increasing interdependence among different legal orders that makes the role of jurisprudence ever more vital in the European constitutional space. As a consequence, the judicial dialogue is at the centre of scientific debate. However, it is still an unclear concept, enveloped by a cloud of scepticism. Starting from the main criticism based on the number of judicial conflicts, the talk aims to add clarity to the concept by analysing the nature and the dimension of the phenomenon, with particular attention paid to the importance of the homogeneity created by judges. The question is whether the current judicial pluralism can do without a hierarchical logic, substituting a dialogical logic based on a community of values. Should we on the basis of the considerable potential for judicial conflicts and juridical competition speak of a ‘Babel of Courts’? Or should we also on the basis of the German experience relativize the problem of the last word and rather speak of ‘Courts for Babel’, which – as Sabino Cassese suggests in his book ‘I tribunali di Babele’ – put order into the system?