This chapter takes the reader to the innermost chamber of the court: the deliberation room. There, the story untangles the maze of interactions that occur among the adjudicators as they finally decide the merits of the case. What commentators usually describe as the moment of truth is, in fact, a delicate dance of assertions and contestations, argument and counterargument, lunges and sidesteps. Amid the confrontation, judicial bureaucrats work staunchly and discreetly to guide the flow of the debate, broker compromises, and overcome stumbling blocks. The decisions and instructions that eventually emerge from deliberations may well be the truth – but a carefully constructed one. The deliberative practices of the various courts and tribunals, all described in this chapter, are more than simple logistical matters or mere conveyors of content. Rather, they have a crucial impact on the way adjudicators arrive at their decisions and, therefore, on the substantive outcomes of each dispute.

The third chapter describes how the the re-definition of the ECJ’s role from the 1960s onwards has affected its procedural and organisational law. It is well known that through decisions such as Van Gend en Loos and Costa v ENEL, the ECJ contributed to changing its mandate: from protecting the interests of the Member States to aiming to establish EU law as an autonomous and effective legal system. This chapter tells the story of how the Court’s procedure, organisation and decision-making was adpated to effectively exercise this new role. The chapter shows in detail the vast transformation the Court’s organisation and decision-making has undergone. It explains how the role of the ECJ judge was developed from state representative to neutral expert, how an inner circle of ECJ participants gradually formed that plays a central role for the acceptance and dissemination of the Court’s case law and which procedural mechanisms were devised to make ECJ decision-making more hierarchical in order to foster and maintain consistency in the Court’s case law.

The chapter deals with the assignment of cases to reporting judges and judicial formations at ECJ. EU lawyers generally consider the ECJ’s system of case assignment to be one of the most problematic features in the court’s decision-making process. They perceive a strong tension with the right to a fair trial. The aim of this chapter is to understand why the court maintains a system that has been under severe attack for a long time. By closely analysing the practice of case assignment between 2003 and 2019, charting assignment profiles of individual judges, the chapter argues that the ECJ’s assignment system is a key mechanism for the court’s institutional success. It has allowed the court to maintain a sense of common purpose, a strong and persistent idea of its mandate as a guardian of the effectiveness and primacy of EU law. The chapter identifies three key functions case assignment performs. First, supporting jurisprudential stability and continuity by creating an elite group of judges who writes the bulk of the most important ECJ decisions. Second, integrating new ECJ judges through gradually assigning them more difficult cases thereby structuring a learning process for becoming a full-fledged ECJ judge. And third, the ECJ’s system of case assignment has helped to maintain what is generally lost in courts of the ECJ’s size: a place where all twenty-seven ECJ judges and eleven Advocates General are informed on all incoming cases, jointly engage in systematizing the ECJ’s case law and framing the court’s agenda.