Kalender des ICES

The colloquium will take place in-person in RIGA 601.

The talk presents a new empirical approach to identifying court driven legal change, by studying court citations to previous case law. It focuses on the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Like other precedent setting courts, the judgments of the CJEU include holdings specifying rules and principles. A core challenge for research is how to identify changes to the relevance of such holdings – their precedential value – without having to engage in resource intensive qualitative legal research. We use machine learning techniques to predict expected citations, based on the Court’s previous citation behavior and the relevance of a holding to the facts and legal issues raised in new cases, and operationalize the precedential value as the ratio of actual citations to expected citations. Besides contributing to academic research on legal change our project aims at developing better tools for judges and practicing lawyers when deciding which cases to rely on.