Legal scholars as well as political scientists and historians have analysed the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as one of the main actors in the integration process. A heroic reading of the Court has focused on its role as a major motor of European integration (Cappelletti, Seccombe, Weiler 1986), leading to a debate on judicial activism (Dawson, De Witte & Muir 2013) and the ECJ as a political power (Alter 1996, Schmidt 2018). Other scholars have used variants of principal–agent approaches to look at the way the Court respond to Member States’ positions or demands (Larsson and Naurin 2016), while another strand of the literature has tried to open up the institutional black box of the Court in analysing its functions from a sociological and historical institutionalist point of view (Vauchez 2008).

Despite this considerable number of studies, the ECJ remains an institution difficult to understand due to the secrecy of its deliberations and the lack of dissenting opinions, among other things. Is the Court’s case law pro-integration and market-oriented? Has the Court exerted self-restraint in a context of constraining dissensus? Is it enough to study the Court qualitatively through the so-called landmark rulings or should we also use quantitative methods to be able to draw general conclusions on the Court’s entire case law? The proposed panel, organised in the framework of the UACES’ research network EU Futures, seeks to find new ways to analyse the Court and the EU’s judicial system by focusing on research methods and interdisciplinarity.

We introduce the "Research handbook on Interdisciplinary research methods in EU law", a collective volume including the work of over 30 authors and representing the state of the art on interdisciplinary scholarship that takes an interest in the legal order of the European Union. The presentation sets out the main rationale for the research handbook: first, in studying the relationship between various disciplines, we seek connections, not separation. The handbook does not aim to cement existing disciplinary silos, but to complement the strengths, both of method and of substance, of the various disciplines we consider (history, literature, philosophy, political science, international relations, and so on). Second, we hope to achieve the same synergy, within legal scholarship, for the relationship between doctrinal and non-doctrinal methods. Interdisciplinary studies of EU law herald a shift from doctrinal scholarship to other methods, but, even though they are two different tracks, we conceive them parallel ones, and not in opposition. Even though interdisciplinarity is born out of a rebellion (out of dissatisfaction and in polemic with doctrinal methods), the methods are mutually enriching, in the ways our presentation intends to show.

Inspired by controversy around the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and its alleged judicial activism, the paper charts new waters in evaluating the CJEU case law by considering the Court’s interaction with societal values. Using the US new legal realism and European studies approaches to the CJEU as points of departure, the paper proposes a method to analyse social ideals of the CJEU numerically. It uses the field of industrial relations as an example for applying this approach, providing a critical content analysis of all cases touching upon industrial relations that the EU judiciary heard from 1957 until April 2023. It relies on a coding scheme relating to three social ideals potentially underlying industrial relations and summarised under the notions of consensus, conflict, and flexible governance. The data demonstrates how the Court swerves towards a social ideal of consensual industrial relations over a period of more than 50 years. The article thus demonstrates the potential of social ideal analysis of CJEU case law: it can contribute to identifying how the Court’s rulings relate to social paradigms. Further, social ideal analysis may also offer normative parameters for assessing the social legitimacy of the European judiciary. In order to achieve that, the interrelation of case law as a discourse to other societal discourses at national, regional and EU levels would have to be established – this is a step beyond this paper.

In this paper we address the question of the responsiveness of courts, with a focus of the European Court Justice (ECJ). There is a huge literature in the United States on the responsiveness of the Supreme Court. In Europe, we have quantitative analyses of the Court’s relationship with the Member States (Larsson and Naurin 2016) but the direct influence of Member States governments is rarely studies, and the influence of the public opinion almost never, with a few exceptions (Blauberger et al 2018). Judges do not evolve in a political vacuum. Although they are constrained by law, they are also influenced by the political context in which they issue their judgements. As they need legitimacy, they strive to be in line with both the citizens and the government.

Against this background, we ask the question whether the ECJ is in line with both the Member States and the public opinion, more specifically in times of crisis. We search for innovative ways to study the court’s responsiveness, based on theoretical approaches used in the literature on judicial politics. Assuming that crises may be situations where courts are more inclined to align with the public or with the government, we look at our two cases -Economic and Monetary Union and data protection- during a time period that includes a crisis: the eurozone crisis in the case of EMU; the Snowden revelations about the US surveillance programs in the case of data protection.

In the context of European integration, law has traditionally not only been perceived as an instrument, but also as the very object of integration, playing a constitutive role in the integration process. This paper reconstructs how this vision of law manifest itself in EU legal discourse. It argues three foundational vocabularies can be distinguished in the case law of the ECJ, alternatively locating the authority of EU law in (1) the objectives the EU pursues, (2) the values on which the EU is founded and (3) the systemic nature of EU's legal order. Differentiating between these three vocabularies renders visible how the pursuit of legality is a self-standing factor in the case law of the ECJ, which is expressed through a systemic rationality having a formal and self-referential character. This analysis paves the way for a normative critique, which aims to show the existing gap between the 'legal world' of the ECJ and the 'real world' in which EU law operates, and which calls for a more embedded and contextualist approach to EU law and EU legal studies.