Understanding Change and Continuity in the Precedents of the Court of Justice of the European Union

Judicial precedent-setting is a central and growing part of law in modern democracies. This project addresses an important methodological challenge for research aimed at understanding how law develops over time, namely how to identify continuity and change in precedents at scale without having to devote significant resources to manual qualitative legal analysis. Our proposed solution is based on studying how courts cite their previous judgments, with a particular focus on the Court of Justice of the EU. Using the latest artificial intelligence technology, we can develop models that identify which precedents are relevant sources for a particular legal claim and how the Court relates to these. When we see that a particular precedent that is expected to be relevant—given the problem at hand and the Court's previous citation practice—is no longer cited by the Court, we can conclude that the precedent in question has lost its value as a source of law. Our methodological innovation can be of great importance for theory development in several different fields of central importance in law and political science. This includes research on policy change, on judicial decision-making and on the drivers of European integration. It can also contribute to the development of better information services for practitioners working in EU law.