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.

This chapter describes grassroots activism and the FA’s peculiar organizational structure in which 7,000 grassroots activists have a significant autonomous voice in the FA decision-making bodies. Grassroots activists’ participation in the FA occurs in Base Committees (the movement) and in the different FA factions (the coalition), two different avenues of engagement with the FA. In the former, there is no direct control of factions, leaders, or party elites because Base Committees are not involved in candidate selection. The chapter provides a thick description of the party´s structure and shows the relevance of activism in the FA and its interaction with leaders and factions in party life.

It was her 29th birthday. After ending her shift as a nurse at West Atlanta Pediatrics, Brooke Melton headed out to meet her boyfriend for a celebratory dinner. She was a cautious driver – no speeding tickets, always a seat belt. But as she drove her Chevy Cobalt down the highway, it suddenly cut off. At just before 7:30 p.m. she swerved across the centerline. The oncoming car was unavoidable, it sent her careening into the fast-moving water of Picketts Mill Creek. Twenty minutes later, medics pulled her from the half-submerged Cobalt. And at 10 p.m., the hospital called Brooke’s parents and told them about her accident, her broken neck, and how doctors could not save her.