Cluster 2 | Institutional Approaches to Rule of Law Resilience

Scope. Combines the question of how resilient the rule of law is under stress with the central role of the courts and further institutional actors in defending, sustaining and contesting it. It covers institutional foundations and the ideological, security and geopolitical pressures that test them; how courts, legislatures, executive bodies and other public institutions (should) respond to a rule-of-law crisis and and what enables or constrains their capacity to act ; the tension between strategic litigation and lawfare; non-judicial forms of mobilisation, and access to justice as a broader layer

Rationale. Courts sit at the centre of both democratic regression and resilience. They provide an institutional site where rule-of-law commitments are translated into enforceable constraints, while also revealing the limits of institutional resilience when their decisions are contested or not implemented. So, their effectiveness depends on a wider institutional environment. This cluster asks what a resilient rule-of-law order requires across institutions, what different institutional actors can realistically do in a crisis and how their strategies interact, how case law and legal mobilisation drives change without collapsing into lawfare and without politicisation of judges, and where European and supranational institutions and courts are heading.