4 - EU Law Mobilization

Summary

Very little is known about the role litigating parties play in the cases ending up before the CJEU through the preliminary reference procedure and greater empirical insight into how and why individuals and interest groups use (or don’t use) EU law in national courts allows us to better gauge whether European law can truly be a ‘shield and a sword’ or whether it remains a ‘hollow hope’. This chapter describes the use of a bottom-up approach in studying the dynamics behind litigation before the CJEU by drawing on research conducted among litigating parties that saw their cases referred to Luxembourg. By following the cases from generation-to-conclusion research can shed new light on the proper social and political context of each case. Going beyond the legal interpretation and surface-level statistics, and by combining in-depth semi-structured interviews with other sources like legal documents, newspapers articles and personal documentation of parties involved, this approach is able to unearth the ways in which cases reach the CJEU. This chapter shows how the triangulation of insights from different sources and actors allows researchers to reconstruct the social processes that ultimately lead to potentially groundbreaking CJEU judgements, thereby uncovering the micro-foundations of EU law mobilization.