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Writing Style and Legal Traditions

Document Type

Book Section

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis

Abstract

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in many ways is a unique court, and it has undergone a remarkable transition in its roughly fifty-five years of existence. While it originally consisted of just seven judges, six of whom hailed from a country with a French law tradition, it now consists of twenty-eight judges from all major European legal families. Originally designed as an international court with jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes about the interpretation of an international treaty with a rather narrow scope, it has developed into what might be the single most powerful court in Europe. Despite the ECJ’s importance, the drivers of its decisions are not well understood. Commentators take different views on whether its decisions are mainly motivated by legalistic considerations (Sankari 2013), whether the ECJ is best understood as a political actor with strong preferences toward European integration (Rasmussen 1986), whether the political background of individual actors plays a role (Frankenreiter 2017, 2018), and to what degree the French legal culture, which dominated the ECJ at least during its early years of existence, still influences the output of EU courts today (Komárek 2009; Zhang, Liu, and Garoupa 2018). The study presented in this chapter focuses on one specific aspect of the ECJ’s output, namely, the writing style of its opinions, and uses a computational approach to explore whether the French influence has become less dominant over the years.

Keywords

European Court of Justice, ECJ, Writing Style, Legal Traditions

Publication Citation

Jens Frankenreiter, Writing Style and Legal Traditions, in Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis 153-191 (Michael A. Livermore & Daniel Rockmore eds., 2019)

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