The evolution of European Union law: A new data set on the Acquis Communautaire

Joshua C Fjelstul

European Union Politics, 2019, vol. 20, issue 4, 670-691

Abstract: The European Union legal system is one of the most complex and sophisticated in the world. This article models the Acquis Communautaire (i.e. the corpus of European Union law) as a network and introduces the Evolution of European Union Law data set, which tracks connections between European Union primary law, European Union secondary law, European Union case law, national case law that applies European Union law, and national law that implements European Union law. It is the largest, most comprehensive data set on European Union law to date. It covers the entire history of the European Union (1951–2015), contains over 365,000 documents, and records over 900,000 connections between them. Legislative and judicial scholars can use this data set to study legislative override of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the implementation of European Union law, and other important topics. As an illustration, I use the data set to provide empirical evidence consistent with legislative override.

Keywords: Acquis Communautaire; European Union law; legislative override; network data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116519842947 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:20:y:2019:i:4:p:670-691

DOI: 10.1177/1465116519842947

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().