The European Court of Justice Dataset: Legal Issues and Doctrine
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The article introduces the European Court of Justice Dataset (ECJ Dataset)– a unique collection of 3776 judgments decided by the European Court of Justice since 1952. The hand-coded information about the judgments includes case outcomes, the use of central judge-made concepts in European Union law, and characteristics of the parties to disputes such as gender. This detailed legal information is unavailable from any official databases or other existing data collections. Yet, it is indispensable to examine the effect of politics and other non-legal factors on legal outcomes in the context of the ECJ’s absolute secrecy of the de liberations and the non-disclosure of judicial votes. This dataset thus (1) advances legally informed analysis of judicial behavior and legal research informed by facts; (2) helps scholars grasp the working of a politically powerful international court; (3) furthers the theorizing of the world’s most advanced, developed, and stable forms of regional economic and political integration and (4) pries open one of the most obscure judicial institutions globally.
