Stein Arne Brekke

Polish non-appointments to the Court of Justice

Stein Arne Brekke — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:21:24 +0000

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.

An introduction to web scraping

Stein Arne Brekke — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:05:14 +0000

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 help the reader through basic web scraping, 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.

Speaking Law, Whispering Politics: Mechanisms of Resilience in the Court of Justice of the European Union

Stein Arne Brekke — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:26:47 +0000

My PhD thesis is now published open access in the EUI repository.

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.

In addition to the PDF from the EUI repository, you can also download the entire thesis as an ebook.

Studying the Court of Justice of the European Union in R

Stein Arne Brekke — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000

I have written up an introductory guide to studying the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in R, using data from the IUROPA CJEU Database. It kicks off with a step by step guide describing how to load data from the database into R, before providing some advice on how to manage the data and concluding with some examples of how it can be visualised.

A Spoonful of Sugar: Deference at the Court of Justice

Lucía López Zurita and Stein Arne Brekke — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The European Court of Human Rights famously has its margin of appreciation, but what's up with deference at the European Court of Justice? My article on deference in the ECJ, co-authored with Lucía López Zurita, is out now in the Journal of Common Market Studies!

Rather than deferring parts of its decision as an avoidance strategy or due to the lack of an agenda, we find the CJEU to be more deferential in rulings making expansionist interpretations of EU law.

The CJEU Database Platform: Decisions and Decision-Makers

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

After years of work, the CJEU Database Platform is finally launched in the Cambridge Journal of Law and Courts!

The database contains among other things all decisions, judges, and submissions to the ECJ and General Court of the EU, and is open for use by researchers, students, practitioners, or anyone interested. Have a look!

Law and orders: the orders of the European Court of Justice as a window in the judicial process and institutional transformations

Urška Šadl, Lucía López Zurita, Stein Arne Brekke, and Daniel Naurin, — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Orders are judicial decisions designed to shore up fair and timely resolution of disputes. As written, detailed, and factual documents, they are reliable markers of procedural steps and a unique source of information about the inner working of an institution. This article examines all published orders of the European Court of Justice, drawing lessons from their use. The analysis demonstrates that the pursuit of efficiency and uniform application blurs the lines between the administration and judging. First, it centralises the institution, expanding the duties of the Registry and amplifying the role of the Cabinet of the President of the Court. Second, it bureaucratises the interpretation and the uniform application of European Union law. These processes are common in judicial institutions with no power over their dockets. But the particular European response, authored by the Court, also suggests its reluctance to forfeit the interpretive monopoly.

That's an Order! How the Quest for Efficiency Is Transforming Judicial Cooperation in Europe

Stein Arne Brekke, Daniel Naurin, Urška Šadl, and Lucía López Zurita — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Effective procedural arrangements allow courts to reconcile conflicting demands of timely justice and sound legal argument. In the context of the European Union, conflict between these demands emerged most acutely in the face of paralyzing delays in the preliminary reference procedure. It was partly solved by Article 99 of the Rules of Procedure. The provision allowed the European Court of Justice to dispose of repetitive and legally undemanding cases with a reasoned order in lieu of a judgment. This article analyses all published orders of the European Court of Justice to examine the use and the implications of Article 99 of the Rules of Procedure. It is the first article to do so. We find that the Court resorts to orders to save time and to halt repeated questions from the courts of a single Member State.