The high European judiciaries from Strasbourg, to Luxembourg, to Paris have become powerful institutional actors whose authority has moved past the interpretive, to the normative, to the political, and to the constitutional levels. At the very moment, however, that the judiciary blossoms into a full-fledged institution of government, it must find some new way to construct its legitimacy. This chapter thus sketches out two case studies that offer different, yet related, attempts to reconstruct judicial legitimacy in contemporary Europe. The first focuses on the judicial appointments reforms concerning the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. The second turns to ongoing debates concerning the use of judicial analytics, the reform of the traditional French mode of composing judicial decisions, and other measures designed to increase access to French judicial reasoning. In a long series of interlocking reforms, both the French and European high courts have managed to further increase their already burgeoning clout.

This chapter on Belgian constitutional identity consists of two parts. A first part explores the views of Belgium’s supreme judicial institutions on the relation between the Belgian Constitution – in particular its ‘identity’ – and EU law. It is shown that the courts’ views diverge. Whereas the Cour de Cassation fully complies with EU orthodoxy, the Constitutional Court’s acceptance of the primacy of EU law is based on a constitutional provision and is subject to the proviso that EU law comply with Belgium’s national identity and fundamental constitutional values. The Council of State, for its part, seems to vacillate between these two positions. In a second part, the focus shifts to the meaning of the twin concepts of national and constitutional identity in Belgian law. Those concepts being new to the Belgian legal order, their content is still shrouded in mystery. This contribution makes an attempt to lay bare their meaning by delving into Belgian constitutional history.