Abstract
EU legislators, CJEU judges and EU law scholars have produced streams of texts which determine both what EU law is and what it is perceived to be about. In this paper, 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 4000 articles from a leading EU law journal. Applying a text-mining technique known as probabilistic topic modelling, we find that economic integration remains the focus of EU law but that scholars tend to emphasise rights issues more while ignoring certain topics, such as farming regulations, almost entirely.
Highlights
Anecdotal observation suggests that what legal scholars and law students know about EU law is principally shaped by what they read in textbooks, law review articles and, occasionally, the odd directive or regulation, when these happen to involve their main area of interest
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued more than 55 000 documents, while legal scholars have churned out tens of thousands of articles and case notes along with textbooks and commentaries
Despite the cognitive challenge posed by the sheer mass of texts, statements about the substantive focus of EU law or alleged inflections abound in the legal literature: the Maastricht Treaty marked an inflection from an economic ‘businessmen’s Europe’ to a ‘people’s Europe’[1]; the Charter of Fundamental Rights is meant to have ushered in a more rights-centred vision of the European project[2]; the Lisbon Treaty is intended to have established a more robust and expansive conception of European citizenship,[3] and so on
Summary
Anecdotal observation suggests that what legal scholars and law students know about EU law is principally shaped by what they read in textbooks, law review articles and, occasionally, the odd directive or regulation, when these happen to involve their main area of interest. Whereas farming regulation and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) account for a large share of legislative and judicial activity, they hardly receive any attention from legal scholars.[17] Fourth, attention to human rights has increased across the three categories of documents, human rights topics are significantly more prominent in the writings of academics than in the textual production of legislators and judges. These findings, we speculate, can be rationalised, for a significant part, by the distinct institutional incentives and constraints that determine the thematic orientation of the text producers. We conclude with some thoughts and suggestions on how to further refine our findings and how computer-aided textmining methods ameliorate our understanding of the law
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