Beyond Interoperability: Conceptualizing the European Judicial Data Space as a Socio-Techno-Legal Infrastructure

Data-oriented justice is often portrayed as a set of digital applications and services designed to enhance judicial cooperation, efficiency, and access to justice within the European Union. This paper offers a different interpretation. It approaches the emerging European Judicial Data Space (EJDS) as a socio-techno-legal information infrastructure in the making. Drawing on information infrastructure theory and socio-legal analysis, the paper examines how the EJDS is likely to develop from an installed base of existing legal instruments, technical standards, organizational arrangements, and digital justice infrastructures. The analysis focuses on three illustrative examples: e-CODEX, the European Criminal Records Information System and its third-country nationals extension (ECRIS/ECRIS-TCN), and JUDEX. These examples show that interoperability in European digital justice is not simply a technical design objective, but an iterative process of legal, semantic, organizational, and institutional change and alignment. They also show that judicial data infrastructures evolve incrementally, through adaptation, reuse, and reconfiguration of existing components, rather than through linear implementation according to a single blueprint. The paper argues that the EJDS should therefore be understood as a layered and evolving assemblage of legal, technical, and institutional elements. Its development raises important questions of governance, accountability, standardization, legal diversity, and institutional control. Building a European judicial data infrastructure is not only a matter of technical interoperability or regulatory compliance; it requires reflexive, inclusive, and adaptive governance capable of sustaining trust, procedural fairness, and public value across diverse justice systems.