For years, Poland has refused to appoint judges to the CJEU, leaving the 27th seat of the Court of Justice empty since January 2024. While this has gone largely under the radar, it marks a clear effort from Poland's Law and Justice party (PiS) to undermine the CJEU, and is a somewhat unprecedented affair in the history of the Court.

Though dramatic, Poland's obstructionist agenda appears to have been cut short by a stubborn past appointee refusing to give up his position to power play at the hands of PiS, as well as the 2023 Polish election where PiS finally lost power.

The field of empirical legal studies holds great promise in its agenda to systematically analyse and scrutinise the work of courts. An initial step to this research tends to be the process of data gathering, which can depend on a variety of sources. One such source is the scraping of online sources.

In this guide I provide a brief introduction to web scraping for beginners, using the R programming language to construct a data set of UK Supreme Court decisions from 2009 until today. I start by introducing the reader to basic web scraping techniques, before briefly touching upon data management and basic analysis of descriptive statistics.

The guide is geared towards social scientists and legal academics interested in conducting statistical research of courts of any kind, but it should be a potentially useful resource for anyone interested in gathering data from online sources using R.

Despite having been described as the most powerful international court in the world, the Court of Justice of the European Union rarely faces severe forms of resistance. Why is this?

This is the question I ask in my PhD thesis, defended at the European University Institute in March 2024.

In the thesis I argue that the relative lack of resistance against the Court can be explained in part by a series of resilience techniques, defined as intentional or non-intentional mechanisms which shelter international courts from critique or render them resilient to resistance. I proceed to empirically study a series of such mechanisms as they play out at the CJEU, with each article focusing on a different aspect of the work of the tribunal.

The first article, "Feeding the Court", studies the arrival of cases to the docket of the CJEU. I find that the Court benefits from the self interest of the actors before it through the filtering of the cases arriving to its docket. Most importantly, lower court judges are found to be hesitant to make politically sensitive references for preliminary rulings to the Court, indicating a selective preference for the national judicial hierarchy and a possible concern for career sanctions.

The second article, titled "Speak Easy", studies how the itself Court responds to the political context by adapting its decision-making. It finds that the Court assigns larger chamber compositions to polarizing issues, but responds to a constraining consensus when ruling in politicized policy areas: Rather than doubling down on its legal reasoning and publishing judgments that are more embedded in case law, the Court responds to politicized references for preliminary rulings by issuing shorter decisions with more laconic reasoning.

The third and previously published article, A Spoonful of Sugar, observes the strategic use of deference to the national court by the Court of Justice. Rather than being used as a tool to prevent ruling on controversial topics, we find that the Court is more likely to defer to the national court when making expansive interpretations of EU law, indicating that deference is used as a way to "sweeten the pill" when making decisions that national judges might otherwise be reluctant to accept.

The Court of Justice of the European Union is a highly productive and undeniably powerful international court situated at the top of the European legal hierarchy. In 2023 alone it published close to a thousand judgments, distributed evenly between the first instance General Court and the last instance Court of Justice.

With such a an extensive production, the Court cannot be fully understood merely in terms of legal analysis of its individual rulings. It must also be understood, among other things, as a political actor within the complex context of European politics, as a uniquely successful international court providing lessons for anyone interested in the management of international justice, and as an impressive bureaucracy facing an ever-present challenge of an overloaded docket.

In this guide I provide an introduction to studying the Court of Justice of the European Union using R. I wrote the guide to provide a starting point for students and scholars who are interested in studying the institution empirically, but who are unsure how to access data about the Court or have little to no experience with statistical analysis in R.

In the guide I describe the process of downloading data from the IUROPA project, making a subset of this data for analysis, transforming variables, and studying the data through descriptive statistics and visualisations. The guide is written to be accessible for anyone who has an interest in gaining familiarity with the R programming language.