I just dropped an article in European Politics and Society titled “EU Judicial Behaviour Research: A Look Back and a Look Ahead,” about European Union courts have been studied over the last 30 years.
We’ve learned a ton about the Court of Justice and how it works with local courts and people in court cases. But it is important to point out the not-so-great parts:
- Parochial tendency: Turns out, this research field has been rather stuck in its own bubble, not really using new theories from other places and literatures.
- Old School Methods: Methodology is often outdated and not really keeping up with how we need to prove things — not least causation — in research today.
- Data, Where You At?: There’s also this issue of not having data, especially on what national courts are up to when they’re not dealing with the big EU Court within the preliminary ruling procedure.
Game Plan for the Future
I suggest some ideas to bring the field forward:
- Mixing Theories: Researchers should borrow more from judicial behaviour research in other settings, especially theoretical insights. This could really help the field.
- Getting Smarter Research Designs: Time to get creative and use experimental and quasi-experimental methods to make empirical findings more credible.
- Tech to the Rescue: It’s time to embrace new tech, webcrawling and Natural Language Processing (NLP) — which have been making great strides — to dig up new info and insights at scale.
In short, it’s a call to action for shaking things up in EU judicial research.