Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas L. Brunell

The European Court and the National Courts

Data Set on Preliminary References in EC Law, 1958-98

Cite as: Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas L. Brunell Data Set on Preliminary References in EC Law, Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute (San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy, 1999).

CODEBOOK

Introduction and Overview

With the help of the Research and Documentation Division of the European Court of Justice, we compiled information on all of the preliminary references filed with the European Court since the first reference in 1961. The most recently collected data end, for most countries, in May or June of 1998. We hope to update this data periodically.

In 1996-97, we coded and analysed all preliminary references filed through mid-1995 (see Scholarly Literature section below). This data set contained the first 2,978 references filed, which invoked 3,805 different claims of EC law (see the discussion of legal subject matters in Appendix D below). In 1998-99, we coded all preliminary references filed through mid-1998. This new data set, which we make accessible here, contains the first 3,714 reference filed, which invoke 4,974 separate claims.

At this website, you will be able to download the data set in Excel format. You can then translate the file into a statistics program, such as STATA or SPSS, in order to search and sort references along any one dimension, or combination of dimensions, including the following: date, member state, court of referral, legal domain or subject matter (e.g., competitition, environmental protection, free movement of goods), and the official European Court Reports citation. Thus, if you were doing research in the area of free movement of workers, you could instantly call up a list of all references made, and be in the position to compare litigation patterns across time, member-state, and across jurisdictions within any given member-state; you would also obtain information on whether the reference has led to a judgement of the Court, or whether it is still pending or has been disposed of in some other way.

To take an example, if you were to call up the Dassonville case (European Court of Justice Case 8/1974, European Court Reports 1974, p. 837) using the STATA command - "list if filedate= =1974 & case= =8" - you would be presented with this information:

This entry is to be read as follows:

• Line 1 ("country") provides a code for the member-state of origin, in this case "2," which is Belgium. Codes for member-states are listed in Appendix A.

• Line 2 ("filedate") gives the year of the preliminary reference, in this case "1974," and line 3 ("case") gives the number assigned to the reference, that year, by the European Court of Justice, in this case, "8."

• Line 4 ("decision") tells you that the case was disposed of by a judgement of the Court, which is coded "1," as opposed to pending (coded "3") or having been withdrawn (coded "4"). Codes for "decision" are listed in Appendix B.

• Line 5 ("referent") provides the code for the national court that filed the preliminary reference, in this case coded "219," which refers to a Belgian tribunal de premiere instance. Codes for national courts are listed in Appendix C.

• Lines 6-10, marked "matter1," "matter2," etc., concern the substantive area of EC law invoked by the referring court, in this case free movement of goods/measures having equivalent effect, which is coded "370," and competition/exclusive contracts, which is coded "347." Codes for legal subject matters are listed in Appendix D. All references invoke between 1 and 5 different substantive areas (with the exception of certain "joined references," which may have 0; see discussion for Appendix B). In the Dassonville case, the referring judge raised questions in two such areas, but not more than two, which is why the entries for "matter3," matter4," and "matter5" are filled only with a period, "." (i.e., the data are missing). Codes for legal subject matters are listed in Appendix D.

• Lines 11-23: as described in the introduction to Appendix D, we (Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas L. Brunell) commonly aggregate subject matters into larger meta-categories for purposes of counting and analysis. For each reference, you will find the thirteen most important such meta-categories listed. In this case, the referring judge raised one question falling within the free movement of goods (counting variable labeled "freemove"), and another within competitition (counting variable labeled "compet").

Scholarly Literature

The following articles making use of this data set have been published:

Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas L. Brunell. 1998. "The European Courts and the National Courts: A Statistical Analysis of Preliminary References, 1961-95." Journal of European Public Policy 5 (1): 66-97.

Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas L. Brunell. 1998. "Constructing a Supranational Constitution: Dispute Resolution and Governance in the European Community." American Political Science Review 92 (1): 63-81.

Alec Stone Sweet and James A. Caporaso. 1998. "La Cour européenne et l'intégration" (The European Court and Integration). Revue française de science politique 48: (2): 195-244.

Alec Stone Sweet and James A. Caporaso. 1998. "From Free Trade to Supranational Polity: The European Court and Integration." In Wayne Sandholtz and Alec Stone Sweet, eds., European Integration and Supranational Governance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 92-133.

Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas L. Brunell. 1997. "The European Courts and the National Courts." Jean Monnet Workingpaper No. 97/14. Cambridge: Jean Monnet Center for European Law, Harvard Law School.

Rachel A. Cichowski. 1998. "Integrating the Envrionment: The European Court and the Construction of Supranational Policy." Journal of European Public Policy 5(3): 387-405.

Please let us know if use this data set in any published working paper, article, book chapter, book, etc.. We will then post the citation here. Email us at: alec.sweet@nuffield.ox.ac.uk or brunell@binghamton.edu.

Errors in the Data Set and Coding

Please signal errors by emailing us at: alec.sweet@nuffield.ox.ac.uk or brunell@binghamton.edu

Original Data in Hard Copy

The hard copy versions of these data are stored in two locations: (1) the Global Peace and Conflict Studies Center, the School of Social Sciences, the University of California, Irvine, CA, USA (Wayne Sandholtz, Director); (2) the Robert Schuman Centre, the European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy (Yves Meny, Director).

Appendix A: Member-States

References were coded in terms of their member-state of origin, as follows:

Appendix B: Current Status of References

References were coded in terms of their current judicial status, as follows:

Information on the status of references filed prior to mid-1995 have not been updated, that is, the data set indicates the situation current as of mid-1995. Thus, a reference from 1994 and coded as pending may well have been decided. For references filed since mid-1995, the data set indicates the situation current as of mid-1998.

Typically, the Court "joins" references cases that are filed by the same national judge, on the same day, involving the same legal dispute (although each reference involves a separate litigating party). Information concerning legal subject matters (Appendix D) does not always appear. In our analyses of the 1961-1995 data, we did not exempt joined cases (of which there were 413). In our analyses of the 1961-1998 data, we treat each complex of joined cases as a single reference, by dropping those coded "5." There are 579 joined cases in the data set made available here.

Appendix C: National Courts of Referral

Appendix D: Substantive Areas of EC Law

We coded information on the substantive area of EC law being litigated using a reference system developed by the European Court. The Court classifies each reference in terms of one or more legal domains, or legal subject matters, as delimited by the EC treaties, using a system of abbreviations. We have given each of these classifications a number. Although there are a handful of exceptions, references falling within the purview of the ECSC comprise a 100-series; those falling within the purview of the EAEC make up a 200-series; and references on EEC law constitute a 300-series. In the 100-series (ECSC), you will find two 300-series (EEC) codes (for "industrial policy" and "state aids") cross referenced with 100-series codes; and, in one case (transportation), a 300-series code substitutes for a 100-series code. This occurs because the Court itself has coded some references with the same abbreviation, without regard to treaty. One can determine the treaty-basis of the reference only by reading the case, if it has been decided.

In our analyses of the data published in 1998 (literature cited above), we commonly aggregated references that fell with the same legal domain, by constructing a system of ordinal variables that would, for example, sort all references falling within the 302-335 code range into a meta, agriculture category (variable labeled "agri"), and those falling within the 367-375 range into a meta, free movement of goods category (variable labeled "freemove"). These meta-categories are marked with the variable label on the first line of any sub-grouping of subject matters, and continue until that group is set off by a blank space. We combined same or similar categories across treaties: thus, references falling within the meta category for competition in the ECSC (coded 103-109) were combined with those falling within the meta category for competition in the EC (coded 343-350).

Taken together, the meta-categories contain roughly 90% of total subject matters invoked in references. For each reference, coded entries consist of a number between 0 and 5, with 0 indicated that none of the claims fall within the subject matter denoted by that metacategory, and 1 through 5 indicating how many different claims fall within a single metacategory of EC law. Thus, if a reference invoked both UNDERTAKINGS (coded as 346) and DOMINANT POSITION (coded as 348) with the competition domain, you would find a "2" entered after the metacategory "compet." In other words, a metacategory is a counting variable.

These counting variables are as follows:

Agriculture (labeled "agri")
Free Movement of Goods (labeled "freemove")
Competition and Dumping (labeled "compet")
External Relations (labeled "external")
Social Security (labeled "socsec")
Social Provisions (labeled "socprov")
Environment (labeled "environ")
Establishment (labeled "estab")
Free Movement of Workers and Persons (labeled "movework")
Taxation (labeled "tax")
Transportation (labeled "transprt")
Commerical Policy (labeled "compolc")
Approximation of Laws (labeled "apprxlaw")