Abstract
AbstractEuropean Union legislators, CJEU judges and EU law scholars have produced streams of texts which determine both what EU law is and how it is perceived. We explore what these distinct “voices” tell us about the EU’s legal and policy priorities using a mega corpus compiling more than 200,000 legislative acts, 55,000 court rulings and opinions, and 4,000 articles from a leading EU law journal. Applying an unsupervised machine learning technique known as probabilistic topic modelling, we find that economic integration remains the focus of EU law, but that scholars tend to emphasize rights issues more and ignore certain topics, such as farming regulations, almost entirely. The relationship among these partly interdependent, partly autonomous voices, we suggest, can be conceptualized in terms of co-evolution. Legislation influences issue attention on the CJEU, which, in turn, influences what law professors choose to write about.
Highlights
Applying an unsupervised machine learning technique known as probabilistic topic modelling, we find that economic integration remains the focus of EU law, but that scholars tend to emphasize rights issues more and ignore certain topics, such as farming regulations, almost entirely
Some commentators have stressed the growing role of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) “as a human rights adjudicator”5 that “has evolved from being a tribunal concerned primarily with economic matters to one with a much wider range of jurisdiction which is explicitly tasked with enforcing human rights.”6 For many, the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty marked the EU’s new age as a human rights actor,7 where the EU’s center of gravity is no longer limited to the policy areas such as free trade, the single market and regulation8, but has expanded to the fields typically reserved for its sister organization, the Council of Europe
Some CJEU judges have explicitly declared that their Court is not a “human rights court.”11 While it has been claimed that the use of human rights discourse by the CJEU reflects less an aspiration to promote rights than a desire to strengthen the principles of supremacy, autonomy, and legitimacy of EU law,12 some see the recent case law as evidence that the CJEU is taking rights more seriously
Summary
EU legislators, CJEU judges, and academics who write about EU law operate in very different institutional environments. Unlike EU legislators such as the European Commission, CJEU judges cannot act sua sponte They can only engage with an issue if a litigant files a suit. Market Law Review, the Cahiers de droit européen, and Europarecht to have authors affiliated with the European Commission, the CJEU or other EU institutions.25 We would expect such institutional links to increase thematic overlap across legislative, judicial, and academic discourse. Even though the concept of convolution does not necessarily entail that reciprocal influences are symmetric in magnitude, it implies that one group cannot exist, or at least not in the same way, without the other It is, difficult to imagine how EU scholarship would look like were the CJEU to stop issuing decisions. Because of legal scholars’ focus on courts and relative neglect of legislation, we should expect considerable thematic overlap between judges and legislators, and judges and academics, but less between academics and legislators
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