abstract | Rule of law indices are a powerful tool to detect ills in the rule of law of EU Member States. In order to explain how to improve the indices’ potential, we give a critical overview of the methodological issues of the four rule of law indices which we consider particularly instructive for our purpose. These are the indices provided by the Freedom House (“Freedom in the World,” FIW), the Bertelsmann Stiftung (“Bertelsmann Transformation Index,” BTI), the World Bank (“Worldwide Governance Indicators,” WGI), and the World Justice Project (“Rule of Law Index,” WJP RLI). After analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of these indices, we turn to the EU Justice Scoreboard (EUJS). While the introduction of the EUJS in 2013 has already been an important step in order to lay the ground for an EU-wide analysis, I suggest how the EUJS should be further developed into a proper rule of law index by aggregating expert opinions into a single number. This would make the EUJS a significantly more useful tool in the ongoing EU rule of law crisis.
biography | András Jakab is Professor of Austrian Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Salzburg and one of the key voices on EU Rule of Law and Supranational Constitutionalism. Prof. Jakab's monograph on European Constitutional Language was published by Cambridge University Press, he is also the author of numerous articles in leading academic journals and of edited volumes, including, The Enforcement of EU Law and Values (with D. Kochenov, Oxford University Press, 2017). Formerly he was the Director of the Institute for Legal Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and held different research and teaching positions in Madrid, Liverpool, Nottingham and Heidelberg.
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