Researching the European Court of Justice

The book explores cutting-edge interdisciplinary research strategies for the study of the Court of Justice of the European Union.

The book provides new methodological tools and approaches to the study of the European Court of Justice and its embeddedness in European society and economy. It introduces cutting-edge research in the fields of history, sociology, political science and linguistics to novel accounts of the actors and dynamics behind the Court.The book takes stock of the on-going 'methodological turn' in the field of EU law scholarship. Introducing a new generation of scholars of the European Court of Justice from law, history, sociology, political science and linguistics, it provides a set of novel interdisciplinary research strategies and empirical materials for the study of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The twelve case studies included challenge the usual top-down approach to EU law and the CJEU and instead suggest a more localized and fine-grained observation of the socio-legal actors and practices involved in the making of CJEU case-law. Moving beyond mainstream legal scholarship and the established 'grand narratives' of legal integration, the volume provides a more historically-informed and sociologically-grounded account of the EU law's uneven embeddedness in Europe's economies and societies.