Viewed as crucial to the process of European integration, domestic judicial dynamics drew the attention of empirical scholars early on. Participation in the preliminary ruling mechanism and the motivation of domestic judges to engage the Court of Justice, in particular, have formed a central theme of this scholarship. The accumulated research and data have helped unearth valuable insights about patterns of conflict and co-operation in the emerging multi-level legal order, casting a wider light on issues, litigation, and institutional determinations of legal integration. Some unmapped areas have remained, most notably regarding EU law use outside Article 267. While driving the empirical exploration of EU law, this body of scholarship has also suffered from theoretical and methodological limitations.

The concluding chapter provides a summary of the findings and arguments developed in the previous chapters. It also provides a reflection on the policy implications of the study for reforming the international governance of the Amazon and other international rainforests, such as the Congo rainforest. Finally, it provides some reflections on how the proposed framework can be applied to global commons, such as the high seas and seabed beyond national jurisdictions, and outer space.

This use of preferred pronouns for those with trnsgender identities is extraordinarily contentious within the context of debates on sex and gender identity. This chapter begins by exploring why pronouns are so contentious, arguing that their use is an important signifier of underlying beliefs about the relationship between sex and gender identity. From here, the chapter explores whether and under what conditions an emplouyer could interfere with the expression of employees to prohibit or compell the use of particular pronouns. It concludes that this will require a fact-sensitive analysis which begins from the understanding that the right to freedom of expression is robustly protected, especially in the context of compelled speech.

Over the last half century, there have been developments within European human rights law which have afforded protection to those undergoing gender reassignment. This chapter traces this development, centred around what the law referred to as ‘transsexualism’, understood in distinctly medical terms. The first major development came with the expansion of sex-based discrimination protections to also protect those who were proposing to undergo, who were undergoing or who have undergone medical procedures related to gender reassignment. This expansion of anti-discrimination protections relied on comparators of the same biological sex not undergoing reassignment, rather than altering the core meaning of sex in domestic law. Eventually, however, human rights law developed to protect a right to gender recognition in the landmark case of Goodwin, where the European Court of Human Rights held that denial of legal gender recognition from post-operative transsexuals violated their right to private life. Parliament responded by enacting the Gender Recognition Act 2004, providing a mechanism to change one’s legal sex but also setting clear limits on the scope and extent of that change, including where it would conflict with the purposes of other legislation.

This chapter focuses on the policy impact of the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It defines policy impact as the ability of the Court to produce change in the political domain. The chapter analyses this impact across two different dimensions: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal dimension looks at the impact of the Court’s rulings on European Union policies, that is, to what extent the judgments of the Court impact the policy output of the European Union legislator. The vertical dimension focuses on the impact of the Court’s judgments on Member States’ legal orders. This is understood broadly as encompassing change as showing through in legislation, case law, policies, and administrative decisions. The chapter begins by developing a conceptual framework to delimitate what we understand as policy impact. It then systematically reviews the existing literature in this area to systematise existing knowledge and identify lacunas, shortcomings and challenges. Finally, it proposes, based on the strengths and weaknesses of this literature, a new way for thinking about how to empirically study the policy impact of the Court.

This chapter offers an overview of the varieties of data that are used in EU law scholarship alongside an overview of the associate research methods employed to analyse it. Based on a systematic literature review of 248 academic articles in the area of EU law and EU courts specifically, it addresses two questions: first, what data sources and methods are the most prevalent in EU law? Second, what are the advantages and pitfalls of different data sources and research methods and how can an understanding of these improve the study of EU law? Finally, the chapter seeks to stimulate a critical discussion of the extent to which emerging and non-traditional data sources both complement and challenge the traditional understandings of what counts as law. The chapter starts with an overview of the most commonly used source of data in EU legal research on courts – courts’ case law – before turning to other, less traditional sources of data in EU law such as interview and survey data, and data based on official statistics, newspapers, and courts’ websites.

This Chapter explores how consent to sexual activity can be vitiated for the purposes of sexual offences where the defendant has engaged in an operative deception as to biological sex. It offers a defence of the current legal doctrine, drawing upon Chloë Kennedy’s theory of consent vitiation by identity non-recognition. The central argument is that the current law correctly identifies that homosexual sexual activity is of a different sexual nature to heterosexual activity and is of central importance to the formation of sexual orientation and sexual identity, particularly for lesbians and gay men. An operative deception as to biological sex is sufficiently proximate to the sexual nature of the activity in question that it is capable of vitiating consent. In contrast, Alex Sharpe argues that the privacy of transgender people should take precedence over the sexual integrity of others and that sexual boundaries based on biological sex are transphobic and prejudiced, equivalent to racism. For this reason, Sharpe argues that transgender people should be immune to the criminal law of sex by deception as to sex. The chapter concludes by critiquing this view and defending the importance of sexual orientation for the freedom and capacity of people to choose to engage in sexual activity.