What Do Courts Learn from Negative Feedback?

Writing scientific papers is tough and convincing a top academic journal to publish your work is even tougher. Is there a single academic who has never felt a pinch of discouragement upon seeing her article rejected? An interesting question is how we react to this sort of negative feedback: Do we take the resolve to do better and revise our work? Or do we just give up? In a paper with Nicolas Lampach and Monika Glavina published in the Journal of Law & Courts, we asked this question about courts submitting references to the European Court of Justice. Submitting courts, even those inexperienced with the preliminary ruling mechanism, don’t appear to be chilled by negative feedback. Better still: they seem to learn from the experience and upgrade the quality of their references.