Judges too Wise for our Own Good:  Is Anyone Still Protecting Civil Liberties in France?

 

At a time when European democracies are in an unprecedented crisis and far-right parties are coming to power, the courts are more than ever in a position to be the first safeguards and guarantors of our rights and freedoms. But are our judges really protecting us? Are they truly ready and equipped to assume such a role? Drawing on extensive legal and sociological research, Hennette-Vauchez & Vauchez’s new book - Des Juges Bien Trop Sages - investigates those French courts who judge of the State and its public policies: the Council of State and the Constitutional Council. By tracing their historical embeddedness in a Fifth Republic primarily concerned with guaranteeing executive power, the book shows how these two courts have let their guard down, accompanying rather than limiting two (anti-terrorist and sanitary) lengthy states of emergency while keeping rights and freedoms at bay. Ultimately, the French supreme courts have participated in the crisis of confidence and legitimacy afflicting our democracies.

 

 

 

Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez is a Professor of Public Law at Paris Nanterre University and a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France; she is a member of the CREDOF (Centre de recherches et d’études sur les droits fondamentaux). Her research focuses on gender, bioethics, secularism, states of emergency, and various concepts and regimes of restrictions on freedoms. Among her recent publications: La démocratie en état d'urgence. Quand l'exception devient permanente (Seuil, 2022); with Ruth Rubio Marin, The Cambridge Companion to Gender and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2022); L'école et la république: la nouvelle laïcité scolaire (Dalloz, 2023) and (with Laurie Marguet), De Haute Lutte. La révolution de l'avortement (CNRS Editions, 2025).

 

Antoine Vauchez is a Research Director at CNRS in political sociology and law, and director of the European Center for Sociology and Political Science (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/EHESS). His work focuses on the emergence of a European center of power, the consolidation of a "power of independence" around courts of justice, central banks and regulatory agencies, neoliberal transformations of States, and the emergence of a politics of influence at the boundaries of the public and private spheres. He has published The Neoliberal Republic. Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft and the Making of Public-Private France (Cornell UP, 2021) and Brokering Europe. Euro-lawyers and the Making of a Transnational Polity (Cambridge UP, 2015).