The growing popularity of empirical legal studies (ELS) in the EU has gone hand in hand with increasing resistance against the new movement. This raises the issue as to whether, and what precisely, empirical legal research adds to our understanding of EU law. The chapter argues that the contribution is three-fold. First, ELS allows us to investigate old questions about EU law which we have always been asking, but with different – often better suited – tools. Second, it adds important new questions to the research agenda that had previously escaped scholarly attention. Third, it extends the concept of EU law, making it richer and more inclusive. This intellectual acquis is its strength but also makes ELS susceptible to two lines of critique. Some may see it as going too far, methodologically and substantively, from existing legal scholarship and discourse, others as not going far enough.

Chapter 2 explains how international law governing rivers has evolved to establish a requirement that upstream and downstream sovereigns must consult and negotiate in good faith to determine mutually satisfactory solutions for the shared use of rivers.

This chapter considers the ‘globalisation’ of empirical legal studies (ELS). Yet, is ELS, in fact, a global enterprise or even a mainstream approach to analysing law and legal institutions in the United States and Europe? Hence the question mark at the end of the chapter’s title. To develop an answer, the chapter begin by asking what is meant by ‘empirical legal studies’; specifically, how can projects falling into this genre be categorised? The chapter proposes an answer by focusing on the goals of the research rather than on (contentious matters of) data and methods. Based on this characterisation of ELS, the chapter inventories academic journals to gauge the spread of ELS. Finding that ELS hasn’t gone as mainstream as the term ‘globalisation’ might suggest, it offers proposals for forward movement.

Chapter 7 examines climate change as a transnational and existential threat to humanity generally, and to certain smaller and vulnerable states most dramatically. Since it poses an existential threat to low-lying coastal states and raises the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, Chapter 7 makes the case that climate change should be understood to trigger duties of international cooperation.

Chapter 8 considers international territorial administration through multilateral governance structures, devoting special attention to Antarctica as a global res communis for peaceful exploration and scientific study.

The chapter discusses the creation and maintenance of databases offering accurate, research-ready data for multidisciplinary use. It draws on the experience with the IUROPA CJEU Database Project (IUROPA), which has collected data about the decision-makers and the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). IUROPA and similar multi-user databases must live up to four criteria for databases, as proposed by Weinshall and Epstein. First, they must address real-world problems. Second, they must be open and accessible. Third, they must deliver reliable and reproducible data. Fourth, they must be ageless and easily calibrated to research purposes unknown at the time of data collection and cleaning. These criteria involve trade-offs: the quest for reliability may, first, precipitate difficult choices such as whether to discard or improve upon ‘imperfect’ data or tempt creators to endlessly postpone publication of ‘incomplete’ data; second, sustainability and human intervention are inversely proportionate when it comes to database maintenance; finally, a fledgling discipline like empirical legal studies in EU law imposes a disproportionate time commitment and financial responsibility on a small group of researchers.

This chapter demonstrates the divergence between textbook conceptions of the European Commission as the ‘Guardian of the Treaties’ and empirical practice by investigating developments in the centralised enforcement of EU law – that is, in the Commission’s use of the infringement procedure. Since the Barroso II Commission, the number of infringement files that the Commission has decided to refer to the CJEU has declined drastically. The chapter explores potential origins of this development and focuses on the consequences. It shows that the Commission has primarily reduced its enforcement action vis-à-vis the ‘old’ fifteen Member States. Previous ‘usual suspects’ such as Italy and Spain are now no longer discernible. Moreover, from a previous focus on the internal market, taxation, mobility and transport, and the environment, only the latter remains a substantive priority. The internal market, in particular, has gone from priority to afterthought in centralised enforcement.

Chapter 6 shows that international environmental law embraces an equitable approach whereby states must cooperate to suppress transboundary pollution.

European Migration Law (EML) presents a challenge for legal research. The law is formally unitary, yet in practice highly fragmented, and we lack a clear understanding of how its different elements legally interact and shape decision-making. This chapter introduces computational methods to overcome traditional mono-disciplinary constraints in cognising how EML operates in overlapping legal frameworks. Section 19.1 introduces computational legal method as a growing field of research in EU law and outlines some of the principal applications of case law analysis. Section 19.2 profiles a new agenda for researching legal normative interactions in EML through case-citation network analysis. Section 19.3 investigates what is to be gained from using machine-learning methods to explore outcome variance on migration decisions in EU member states. Section 19.4 concludes by reflecting on some of the limitations of our computational legal research and underscores the need to maintain an ethical approach when dealing with normative subjects.

Legal debates within and between the EU institutions are highly influential for their policy choices. Yet, little is known about the legal advice that underscores them. The EU institutions restrict access to this legal data; usually, the only point of access is individual requests under the EU’s public access legislation, Regulation No 1049/2001. This source of legal data has been vastly underused in EU legal scholarship. This chapter addresses the key question of access to non-judicial legal data from the Council and the Commission. Following the critical tradition, the chapter treats EU law primarily as a language of argumentation that enables various interpretations and uses internal legal data as a source of highlighting the political choices involved in legal argumentation – a key endeavour of empirical research in law and institutions. The chapter first outlines the object of inquiry: what legal data exists in the institutions. It then gives examples of how access to documents requests can be systematically used as a method for collecting legal data. This may include confrontations, such as initiating proceedings before the EU Courts and the Ombudsman, which are explored with reference to the author’s own cases. The chapter also raises concern about the future possibilities to study the handling of legal questions within the institutions, increasingly threatened by the problem of empty archives.

Empirical legal research, better known as empirical legal studies (ELS), has arrived in the EU. It introduces a distinct way of thinking about the law – or epistemology – and distinct ways for transforming this thinking from beliefs and opinions to justified beliefs and opinions – or methodology. As an exploration of ELS in EU law, this volume reflects on both. Its purpose is to map the state of the art, highlight the contribution which empirical legal scholarship has made to EU law, as well as its potential, limitations, and the way forward. In this Introduction, we begin by defining its object and objectives, comparing them to existing legal and social science research concerned with legal aspects of European integration. Second, we briefly revisit the field’s historical and geographical origins. Third, we examine the developing relationships between, on the one hand, ELS and, on the other, EU law and political science. Fourth, we address open questions, unchartered territories, and existing obstacles faced by ELS. Finally, we provide an overview of the volume, outlining the individual chapters and the overarching themes which they address.

This chapter delves into the application of Systematic Content Analysis (SCA) when studying EU internal market law and governance. It consists of four parts. Section 18.1 offers an introduction to SCA, presenting its definition and tracing its historical development as a legal methodology. Section 18.2 argues that SCA is a natural choice for studying internal market law given its inherent ambiguity, intricate multi-level governance system, and the limited transparency surrounding the implementation of EU law. Section 18.3 surveys the usage of SCA in legal scholarship on the internal market (1957–2023). It shows the growing trend in usage of SCA, identifying the most important areas of research, types of research questions and data coded, as well as the academic actors and institutions involved. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion on the future of SCA as a legal methodology for studying EU internal law and governance, advocating a greater emphasis on transparency requirements in the application of EU law.

EU legal scholarship has a strong tradition of contextual, somewhat theoretical analysis. That tradition has been facilitated by the open nature of EU law, the grand social goals of the EU, and the need to construct legitimating legal stories around these, but also by the interconnected community of EU law scholars and professionals, which have given the field a kind of autonomy from more doctrinal national law. Yet lacking empirical evidence beyond legal texts, EU law’s free-ranging scholarship is suffering a crisis of disillusionment, paralleled by the crisis of the EU itself, which invites scholars to reconsider the nature of their role. In this context, empirical legal studies is enjoying a huge rise in popularity among EU legal scholars, with its promise of answers to important questions, rather than mere commentary. That leads to synergies as well as conflicts – for resources, and about methods – but above all it seems likely to reorientate EU legal scholarship away from its path of the last five decades and towards a new stylistic and methodological mix.