Project Components

IUROPA CJEU Database Platform

Stein Arne Brekke, Joshua Fjelstul, Silje Synnøve Lyder Hermansen, Daniel Naurin

The IUROPA CJEU Database Platform is the largest and most comprehensive research-oriented database on the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It contains data on the universe of CJEU cases, proceedings, decisions, and judges. It covers the Court of Justice (CJ), General Court (GC), and Civil Service Tribunal (CST) for the Court's entire history (1952-today). The data is collected from the the Court's official Registry, InfoCuria (the Court's official database), and EUR-Lex (the EU's official database of legal documents). All of the data has been cleaned and cross-validated and is research-ready.

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IUROPA CJEU Text Corpus

Michal Ovádek, Joshua Fjelstul, Daniel Naurin, and Johan Lindholm

The IUROPA Text CJEU Corpus is a database of judicial texts from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The database comprises all types of judicial decisions from the Court of Justice, the General Court and the Civil Service Tribunal, as well as Advocate-General (AG) opinions. Each document is split into paragraphs to enable more granular analyses. Where available, both the French and English texts are included. The IUROPA Text Corpus is a more complete database of CJEU texts than Curia or Eur-Lex. Check out this overview of the corpus, created by Michal Ovádek, to learn more.

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Issues and Positions Component

Olof Larsson, Johan Lindholm, Daniel Naurin, Andreas Moberg, Philipp Schroeder, Anna Wallerman Ghavanini, Sebastian Björnberg, Aaron Coster, Moa Näsström, and Irene Otero

The Issues and Positions component of the IUROPA CJEU Database contains information about the specific questions that the CJEU was asked to rule on in the preliminary ruling procedure. It covers the period from 1995 to 2011. It also contains information about the answers to these questions given by the Court in its judgement, the AG in its opinion, as well as the answers proposed by the parties to the case, the EU institutions and the Member States in their observations.

We refer to these questions as "legal issues" and the answers as "positions." There are three tables: one with legal issues as the unit of observation, one with positions as the unit of observation, and one with positions by actors as the unit of observation.

The information has been hand coded by a team of research associates (Sebastian Björnberg, Aaron Coster, Moa Näsström, Alexandra Nouvel and Irene Otero Fernández), supervised by researchers at the University of Gothenburg (Olof Larsson, Andreas Moberg, Daniel Naurin and Anna Wallerman Ghavanini) and Umeå University (Johan Lindholm and Philipp Schroeder).

Issues

The issues table has one observation per legal issue per judgment. There are 5333 legal issues across 2233 judgments. This dataset includes a summary of each legal issue, whether two or more questions from the national court have been merged into one legal issue, whether the legal issue concerns derogations and justifications to violations of the principles of free movement, whether the legal issue concerns direct effect, whether the legal issue concerns the interpretation or validity of EU law, which categories of legal acts the legal issue concerns, which areas of national law the legal issue concerns, and which actors argued that the legal issue was inadmissible.

Positions

The positions table has one observation per position per legal issue per judgment. There are 18617 positions across the 5333 legal issues. This dataset includes a summary of each position on each legal issue, which actors take each position, whether the position holds that an issue is for the national court to determine, how the position would affect the autonomy of the member state, and how the position would affect the scope of individual rights granted by EU law.

We also provide a positions_by_actor table, which has one observation per actor per position per legal issue. There are 41595 observations across 18617 positions. This table is an expanded version of the positions table. It uses the same IUROPA actor IDs as the IUROPA CJEU Database Platform.

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Doctrine and Legal Outcomes Component

Urška Šadl, Lucía López Zurita, Irene Otero, Eun Hye Kim, and Stein Arne Brekke

The Doctrine and Legal Outcomes component of the IUROPA CJEU Database seeks a doctrinally sophisticated and empirically accurate understanding of the interaction between the legal outcome of cases and their extra-legal (political) context.

In broadest terms, it does this by delving into legal argumentation and interpretation systematically. As opposed to the classic legal analysis as a hermeneutical enterprise, deep coding departs from a pre-established set of legally relevant parameters and a detailed coding protocol. As opposed to the classical political science analysis, it goes deeper. Apart from the outcome of cases and the position of the legal actors, it focuses on the CJEU's doctrinal stance, the strictness of judicial review, the scope of the margin of appreciation, the effect of the outcome on EU's competence etc. Importantly, the analysis records whether the CJEU expands its doctrines, considers that the provision has direct effect, protects the rights of the individuals, the interests of consumers, environment and free movement more generally.

By extracting this additional (fine-grained) information from the judgments, we can begin to understand and explore how the CJEU reacts to the political context with legal means and within the constraints of the law. In other words, we can gauge the mechanisms, which let the law get into politics, and politics get into the law, and improve on the research on law and politics in Europe. While the primary aim of deep coding is to contribute to the understanding of judicial authority and long term processes, it can be used to address more urgent research questions of judicial independence (the Portuguese and the Polish judges) as well as politically adverse context (Brexit) or economic crises (the financial crisis).

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National Courts Component

Tommaso Pavone, Anna Wallerman Ghavanini, and Stein Arne Brekke

The National Courts component of the IUROPA CJEU Database provides detailed information about every national court that has referred a case to the CJEU through the preliminary reference procedure laid down in Article 267 TFEU.

National courts have long been heralded as linchpins of the EU judiciary and engines of judicial harmonization. Many have theorized about the drivers that persuade national courts to take up their European mandate, but beyond the most prominent national courts, little information has been available about the CJEU's domestic judicial interlocutors. The purpose of this component is to provide an infrastructure that will allow researchers to gain a better descriptive understanding of the courts that refer cases to the CJEU, and to facilitate empirical analyses of how the varying status and expertise of national courts impinges upon their participation in the process of European integration through law.

National Courts in the CJEU Preliminary Reference Procedure combines scraped data with hand-coding and expert evaluations. These data comprise standardized English translations of the courts, their city location, their position in the domestic judicial hierarchy, their competences and specialization, and whether they engage in collegial decision-making.

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