A 'Europe of Lawyers'? The Making of a Database on Cases and Lawyers of the CJEU

Abstract

(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2021 6(2), 913-921 | Article | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction: why a database of lawyers at the Court of Justice is an important new tool for socio-legal inquiry. - II. The construction of the database. - III. The Court as a place of confluence. - IV. How to complement the analysis? - V. Concluding remarks. | (Abstract) This Article presents a database of lawyers being built within the Court of Justice in the Archives project. Recent studies, relying on actor-centred approaches, have fostered a renewed interest in European lawyers. While vis-its of these lawyers in Luxembourg have fostered the development of transnational legal networks and participated to the acculturation of the Court's informal and formal rules, they remain largely under-studied. We therefore suggest to analyse the Court as a "place of confluence", where different professional groups meet during the course of the proceedings. The database precisely aims at mapping the networks of lawyers that take shape in Luxembourg. Providing statistical analysis of the structuration and evolutions of the Europe of lawyers (agents of the European institutions or Member States, law professors or private practitioners), we suggest that the database could contribute to a better understanding of transformations in the European legal field.

Keywords

• quantitative research
• database
• court of justice
• lawyers
• webscraping
• transversal analysis