Good afternoon, everybody, and warm welcome for the last of ourselves

lunchtime seminars for the term.

It's my great pleasure to welcome our colleague,

Giorna Solanke, who is a senior lecturer at Leeds,

and comparatively rare as an empirical researcher in the area of the EU law.

She has conducted empirical research to do with judges and other generals,

and she's going to share some of that with us with the talk,

the title which you see on the street in front of you,

trust and democracy in the European judicial order, the advocate general securing trust in the

CJAEU, question mark. Over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you all for coming. I know this is

the last week of your term and I'm sure it's been a very

hectic semester for you. So thank you for coming and thank you, of course, to Marcus

Garing, who isn't here, I suspect, for the invitation. So as was said, I'm going to talk

about the Advocate General and think about whether the Adv advocate general can be a way in which that

the court of justice secures trust in itself. And I'll try to explain why I'm a bit under

the caution in relation to time and I've been busy trying to edit my paper but we'll see

how things go. Hopefully I won't edit too much.

That's something I tend to do. This paper is part of a larger project, which is the title at the top,

looking at trust in democracy in the European judicial order. And as I go through, I'll try to

explain what that bigger project is about.

But if I just give you quickly an overview of the Advocate General,

the Advocate General is a role that was written into the original Treaty of Rome.

...