Justice in the balance: Democracy, rule of law, and the European Court of Human Rights By JessicaGreenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025. 256 pp.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is the kind of colossal institution that is notoriously difficult to examine ethnographically. It is the “crown jewel” of a massive infrastructure established in the aftermath of World War II by the Council of Europe: the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a system that, along with the court, comprises the Parliamentary Assembly and the Committee of Ministers. It consists of 46 member countries (until 2022 it was 47, now minus Russia), 600 registry staff, and dozens of judges who work in various constellations. Together, these adjudicate tens of thousands of cases; over 20,000 judgments were pronounced from 1999 to 2020. This colossus extends its human rights protections to over 700 million people across the continent, regardless of whether they are citizens. All have the right to individual petition—a feature that makes this apparatus unique in the world. As one human rights scholar and strategic litigator states to Jessica Greenberg in her outstanding new book, Justice in the Balance, the ECtHR is, as a judicial body, “the best thing we have on the planet” (p. 24) and an avenue of last resort for millions of Europeans. It takes exceptional analytical, methodological, and theoretical sophistication to render this enormous bureaucratic apparatus—a legal machine as much as it is a political and diplomatic one—amenable to ethnographic research and to show how judges, lawyers, administrative staff, and civil society actors navigate what Greenberg calls a “communicative field of practice” (p. 17). Greenberg's razor-sharp analysis renders this apparatus in exquisite detail as she shows how various actors perform both legal and extralegal work to balance this field of practice and its contradictions over time. Such contradictions are infrastructural to the ECHR system, not a failure, as Greenberg powerfully argues; they are a routine expression of what it means to make law across and through variously positioned participants, all of whom wield different communicative repertoires and interpretations of what legal success, justice, and “effectiveness” look like. As Greenberg puts it in her introduction: “Multiple conflicting perspectives are not an obstacle to understanding the Court and ECHR system. They are central to understanding how international legal institutions operate and why people increasingly engage with them” (p. 3). The ECHR system is a constantly evolving body of law and diplomacy; from 1990 to 2007, 25 postsocialist eastern European countries joined the Council of Europe. The system thus faces the conundrum that “the law must be stable but it cannot stand still” (p. 31). Moreover, it operates in “an impossible jurisdiction,” having since its inception maneuvered around a commitment to universalist values and the specific legal developments (and reticences) of its nation-state members. This epistemic community constantly toggles between various binaries: supervision of and deference to sovereign nation-states, publicity and secrecy, bureaucracy and leaps of faith, binding legal authority and soft diplomacy, and the individual and structural potential of human rights. Capturing these complex dynamics requires a specific methodology. Greenberg employs a semiotic toolkit, working deftly across hundreds of conversations and formal interviews and placing different voices and perspectives in conversation. Drawing out resonances across these voices and discerning the meanings people create through shared genres and reference points, Justice in the Balance offers a deeply granular analysis and an engaging read. Central to the book is the term balance—a verb rather than a noun and an achievement built from subtle negotiations, translations, small maneuvers, incremental persuasions, corrections, nudges, and the circulations of language, texts, and ideas. Ultimately, the book exposes the fragility of the liberal international legal order. With its future uncertain, Greenberg insists that we must understand how it works and what parts of it we need to retain. Across six chapters, Greenberg wrestles with the question of how the ECHR system, as a problem space, depends on coordination through (and not despite) friction and disagreement, and on norm generation without total closure. Chapter 1 tracks how her interlocutors manage but never quite resolve ideas of Europe (as relatively narrow, formal legal obligations and/or expressions of shared values that organically emerge from a democratic European project). They negotiate the “us” of Europe and the “we” of sovereign nation-states through what she calls “culture talk”: a mobilization of “culture” that supports different modes of argumentation and legal authority (p. 32). The ECtHR has, for example, found some cases (e.g., those regarding obscene speech) to fall within the ambit of “local cultural norms,” leading the court to defer to national contexts and the principle of subsidiarity. In other cases, such as those pertaining to sexuality, gender orientation, and LGBTQ+ rights, it evokes the importance of tolerance as a hallmark of democracy and thus of Europe as a whole. Chapter 2 explores the 1990s council expansion as an act of “bringing the outside in,” which not only changed the meanings of rule of law and human rights in practice but also entrenched long-standing “civilizational” hierarchies. Again, rather than reconciling tensions, judges and diplomats manage to sustain differences within the ECHR system, asking how something akin to justice and rule of law can perhaps not be fully attained but still serve as the horizon toward which the machinery moves. During those years, the court had to deal with an exploding number of applications and forms of violence that appeared of a different type and order than previous ones (p. 64). As a result, lawyers from the original member states critically reviewed what they had previously perceived as their own unproblematic democratic orders, while new standards for the whole of Europe were set through baseline cases. Chapter 3 addresses the communicative modalities through which people perform the rule of law: efficiency, consistency, transparency, and confidentiality. Here, Greenberg shows beautifully how the law itself demands extralegal work: cultivated dispositions, authorized ways of interacting, and specific communicative and textual performances. By linking speech, personae, and institutional authority, as well as by enacting proper speech (including what can and cannot be said), actors establish the system's judicial authority and legitimacy, more or less successfully. Factors that seem merely managerial, like workflow, are invested with ethical meaning (workflow has a direct impact on the time it takes to process cases), just as communicating timelines and even how to format effective communication are crucial to the court's reputation. Chapter 4 tracks the role of numbers in representing and legitimizing the court's work and its execution of judgments. Here, Greenberg shows that while individual cases are the building blocks for one of the world's most expansive human rights regimes, these cases can be counted and accounted for in ways that allow registry and council staff to balance the individual with the structural potential of human rights. The quantification of human rights, we learn, need not lead to the atomization and disaggregation of underlying structural issues. On the contrary, such methods can allow for an aggregation of cases and the formulation of an argument that violations are structural and cannot be dealt with solely through individual monetary compensation. Quantities are translated into qualities and back, allowing for a “stretching from numbers to patterns and from patterns to qualities or types of actions” (p. 143). Chapter 5 focuses on the question of temporality and on how litigators attempt to shape the meaning of cases through the language of time, specifically how long the process ought to take and through what temporal frameworks it ought to be judged as effective. Rather than argue that justice is undermined by the slow grind of cases through the system, Greenberg makes the surprising point that possibilities for long-term change can be generated by the slowness of institutional time. Indeed, “institutional patience” shows that a judgment won is often only the beginning of a political and diplomatic process that moves according to a different—recursive and reinforcing—temporality. In chapter 6, Greenberg follows a single case pertaining to the structural racism endured by Roma children in the Czech educational system. In doing so, she asks how structural violence can be turned into a justiciable human rights problem. As the case moves from litigation to execution and from the translation of statistics into legal fact, Greenberg illustrates how difficult it is to make racial discrimination visible in legally authorized ways, in part because of the court's impossible “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” standards. Yet even in the face of this impossibility, the institutional infrastructure of the ECHR system allows for the movement of arguments, texts, and language from one point in the system to another, such that the judgment may redefine the scope and origins of the violation and innovatively measure and assess change. Why produce an ethnography of the rule of law at a moment when the failures of international law, its courts, and “the international community” are so glaringly evident? Should we grieve a system in which the distinction between institutional compromise and complicity seems fraught, even negligible? Greenberg makes the profound argument that it is precisely in their breach, and at a moment when so many political actors blatantly refuse to comply with the rule of law, that we must track how people work with the affordances of liberal institutions. They lie not only in the law's utopian horizon, marked by a deep commitment to humanism and the sanctity of the person, but also in its provision of a practical scaffolding that channels the political imagination through the logics and language of the law. If liberalism is failing, then one of our most important tasks today is to interrogate what about it works and what does not, what of it we discard and what we keep. Justice in the Balance is a pathbreaking work that undertakes this crucial task at hand.