EU judicial behaviour research: a look back and a look ahead

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the last three decades, the field of EU judicial behaviour has spawned a sizeable body of work. While the efforts of EU judicial scholars have indubitably generated important insights about the operation of the Court of Justice and its interactions with domestic tribunals and litigants, EU judicial behaviour research suffers from substantial limitations at multiple levels. The first arises from the field’s poor integration with theoretical advances that have emerged in other contexts. The second pertains to its methodological assumptions, which have yet to be updated to respond to the credibility crisis. The third relates to the existing datasets and the paucity of data on national courts’ practices outside the preliminary ruling mechanism. To address these shortcomings, I suggest how the field may benefit from incorporating theoretical advances from research on judges in other contexts, a stronger emphasis on smart designs and experimental and quasi-experimental methods and the deployment of data-crawling and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.