Bulletin n. 2/2016
December 2016
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Urska Sadl and Mikael Rask Madsen
    A Selfie from Luxembourg: The Court of Justice's Self-Image and the Fabrication of Pre-Accession Case-Law Dossiers
    in Columbia Journal of European Law , vol. 22, issue 3 ,  2016 ,  327-354
    How does the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) view itself? Which cases does it regard as most important? These questions have riddled European Union (EU) scholarship for decades. Due to a basic lack of empirical evidence, which is in part a consequence of secrecy surrounding the Court, no empirically firm answer has been provided. In this Article we seek to close this gap in scholarship by using a unique dataset, compiled by the Court itself We use a set of quantitative and qualitative methods to unpack the so-called historic case law dossiers assembled by the Court, and presented to thirteen Member States upon accessions in 2004, 2007, and 2013. We reconstruct the content of the selection as well as the rather specific legal EU that they project. From our empirical analysis, framed by social science theories on the relationship between knowledge and power, it follows that this is not a neutral compilation of what EU law is. On the contrary, the Court seized the opportunity to highlight its own role and the role of individual judges in the formation of the EU legal order. At the receiving end, the importance of the dossier was not in the detailed legal knowledge to facilitate the transition to the EU, but primarily the institutional knowledge on who were the real masters of the Treaties.
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