The next OCE Workshop is planned Thursday, October 19th (13h-14h).
We will have the great pleasure of welcoming Virginie Blum. Virginie is a post-doctoral researcher at emlyon since June 2023. She’ll be giving a talk entitled:
- Who benefits from the ‘Redressement Judiciaire’ (judicial recovery procedure)? Ethnography of decision-making among judges in a French Commercial Court
Abstract: In France, as soon as a company becomes insolvent, one-third of them are eligible for a judicial recovery procedure. This procedure is characterized by a unique spirit: very few legal rules govern its application. Judges are granted significant discretion in their decision-making. So, how do judges make decisions in this context? What criteria do they consider when granting a judicial recovery procedure? On what basis are their decisions founded? How do they negotiate? What constraints do they face?
Research has less frequently addressed the concrete processes and immediate determinants of judicial decisions than it has examined broader determinants to explain variations in judges’ rulings. This perspective provides limited insights into the decision-making process, in part because statistical analysis alone cannot capture the many dimensions of this practice.
My goal for this seminar is to delve into the concrete process of decisions made by judges to determine the initiation (or not) of a judicial reorganization procedure. The analysis I am about to present is the result of an ethnographic investigation conducted over a year and a half as part of my sociology thesis within a major French commercial court. I will highlight the existence of three factors that intersect and shape judges’ decision-making in matters of judicial reorganization: 1/ the establishment of informal “sentence guidelines” specific to the jurisdiction; 2/ the judges’ conception of their own role and their personal ideological preferences, which may lead them to initiate a judicial reorganization measure despite collective rules and values; 3/ the political and institutional constraints that limit judges’ decision-making freedom, as in the case of “big affairs”, highly publicized ones, due to the number of affected employees, where politicians directly intervene in the matter.