Eirini Tsoumani

Dr. Eirini Tsoumani is a Postdoctoral CIVICA Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence for 2025-2026. She holds a PhD in Law from Sciences Po Paris, where her doctoral research examined constitutional adjudication during the Greek sovereign debt crisis. Her work lies at the intersection of constitutional law, legal theory and legal semiotics, with a particular focus on judicial reasoning. Her research explores how supreme courts construct legitimacy through patterns of legal argumentation and institutional performance. She has published on constitutional law and legal theory in leading academic venues, including the Revue du droit public and the International Journal of Constitutional Law, with forthcoming work in Springer and the Journal of Law and Political Economy. Her research has been presented internationally, including at Harvard Law School, the Law and Society Association, the Université de Montréal, and Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Eirini has extensive teaching experience at major universities in Paris, including Sciences Po and Université Paris Panthéon-Assas, where she has taught constitutional law, administrative law, comparative public law, and legal philosophy in both English and French. She is admitted to the Athens Bar and is currently completing her legal training at the École des avocats in preparation for admission to the Paris Bar.

Contact: et3136@nyu.edu

Research Project

Judges Under Constraint: Genealogies of Judicial Reasoning and the Making of European Legal Culture. Eirini’s project examines how judicial reasoning is shaped by internal constraints within legal systems and how these constraints influence the development of European legal culture. The project argues that judicial decisions produce legitimacy through patterned forms of argumentation and institutional performance. Focusing on supreme courts, and particularly on the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the research investigates how certain arguments become dominant, how judicial authority is performed, and how these dynamics evolve over time. It introduces the concepts of “argumentative repertoires” - recurring forms of legal reasoning - and “performative repertoires” - typified judicial roles through which judicial discourse is enacted. Building on her prior research on Greek constitutional case law during the sovereign debt crisis, the project extends the analysis to the European level. It combines doctrinal interpretation, semiological analysis, and computational methods to map patterns of reasoning across a large corpus of ECJ decisions. By tracing shifts in legal argumentation and judicial performance across periods of economic and institutional crisis, the project offers a new account of how courts shape legal meaning, redistribute normative authority, and contribute to the better understanding of the construction of European legal culture and consciousness.