Reason and Fairness: Constituting Justice in Europe, from Medieval Canon Law to Echr

Judiciary as Constituted Power offers a comparative history of the functionality of ordinary judicial competences, contemporary findings of its protective needs in the court internal and external spheres and completed by means of raising historical arguments in modern conventional law.
Throughout Europe, the exercise of justice rests on judicial independence by impartiality. In Judiciary as Constituted Power Ulrike Mussig reveals the combination of ordinary judicial competences with procedural rationality, together with the complementarity of procedural and substantive justice, as the foundation for the rule of law' in court constitution, far earlier than the advent of liberal constitutionalism. The ECHR fair trial guarantee reads as the historically-grown consensus of the functional judicial independence. Both before historical and contemporary courts, justice is done and seen to be done by means of judgements, whose legal requirements combine the equation offair' and legal' with that oflegal' and `rational.' This legal determinability of the judge's fair attitude amounts to the specific (rational) European idea of justice.