A Spoonful of Sugar studies the use of deference at the Court of Justice of the European Union, finding that the Court uses deference strategically as part of its judicial dialogue with national courts. Deferring parts of its decision to national courts allows the Court to "sweeten the pill" when making expansive interpretaitons of European law, which might otherwise cause resistance from national judiciaries. We do not find any support that deference is used in a similar fashion to communicate flexibility to national governments.

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My PhD thesis, completed at the European University Institute, asks a simple question: Why, despite having been described as the most powerful international court in the world, is the Court of Justice of the European Union not facing more frequent and fierce forms of resistance?

I argue that part of the explanation is found in a series of resilience techniques playing out at the Court. I proceed to study these mechanisms empirically as they play out at the CJEU, presenting three separate articles each with a different focus.

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 article, "A Spoonful of Sugar", is co-authored with Lucía López Zurita and has previously been published in the Journal of Common Market Studies.

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In That's an Order! we study the European Court of Justice's use of a special type of order: the one provided by Article 99 of its Rules of Procedure, allowing it to answer references from national courts with an order rather than a judgment - what we label adjudicating orders. We observe that the Court is increasingly issuing this type of order, and that it does so actively as a part of its dialogue with national courts.

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This article launches the CJEU Database Platform, and exemplifies a number of empirical use-cases for the data. It also provides the reader with more general information about the CJEU and its procedures, giving a solid basis for anyone interested getting their hands dirty researching the Court using statistical methods.

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Law and Orders categorises the vast variety of orders published by the European Court of Justice, and shows how observing the orders of the Court can serve as a window into its procedural workings.

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My master's thesis, which was written at the ARENA Centre for European Studies and published as a report by the same centre.

I study the convergence of European asylum recognition rates following the implementation of key directives in the Common European Asylum System, finding that the periods of divergence observed in previous literature coincides with the implementation period of new European directives. From this I conclude that the convergence of asylum recognition rates following European directives might have been underestimated, as the temporary divergence as parties implement policies at different points in time has been mistakenly interpreted as divergence.

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