Symbolic vs. Structural Precedent after Lisbon: Co-Citation Networks Analysis of CJEU Case Law (2008–2015)

We study the architecture of precedent within the Court of Justice of the European Union reconfigured around the Treaty of Lisbon. Using the IUROPA Database, we construct temporally segmented co-citation networks and first analyse them through standard metrics. We then depart from established legal citation-network approaches by applying degree-corrected stochastic block models to recover doctrinal communities while appropriately accounting for the citation imbalance of legal corpora. This enables the identification of structurally central precedents as community representatives. Extending recent work on community-level core–periphery structures, we use the estimated inter-community connectivity parameters to infer each community’s functional role—revealing structural hubs and bridges across doctrinal domains that node-level centrality alone cannot identify. Two hypotheses guide the analysis: H1 (Lagged institutional impact)---Lisbon induces a gradual, modular reconfiguration of precedent; H2 (Symbolic--structural disjunction)---high-visibility ''landmark'' cases exhibit lower structural centrality than ''operational'' precedents that anchor doctrine across domains. Results are consistent with H1: post-2009 snapshots show a gradual but pronounced restructuring of the CJEU’s precedent system. Results also support H2: canonically cited landmarks—though symbolically central—occupy consistently peripheral structural positions. By contrast, operational precedents in areas such as competition law, taxation, state aid, and procedural effectiveness emerge as recurrent core nodes and inter-community bridges. Methodologically, we present a reproducible pipeline for temporal legal-network analysis. Theoretically, we recast ''landmark'' status as symbolic rather than structural authority.