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The EUTHORITY Project is directed by Prof. Arthur Dyevre and hosted by the KU Leuven Faculty of Law. The Project aims to document and analyze inter-court relations across the EU transnational judiciary. The investigators develop theories of judicial decision making, which they test and refine using a combination of game-theoretic modelling and large-scale data collection and analysis. Kick-started in September 2015, EUTHORITY is seeded by a large European Research Council grant and is implemented by an international research team.

Research Focus: Conflict and Cooperation in the EU Judiciary

Domestic judicial support is crucial to the effectiveness of EU rules of law. Without support from national courts the European Court of Justice would remain a powerless judicial body presiding over a body of law which would be, for all practical purposes, a dead letter. Unlike nation states, though, the European Union does not possess a hierarchically-structured judiciary with layers of lower and intermediate courts overseen by a supreme tribunal. Hence, as ECJ judges lack the power to reverse domestic court decisions, the authority of EU law at national level hinges on effective compliance partnerships between domestic and supranational judges.

EUTHORITY investigates both the conflictual and the cooperative dimension of the compliance partnership which the ECJ has developed with domestic peak courts. We seek, in particular, to establish how the compliance partnership and, thereby, the authority of EU law are affected by heterarchy--the absence of hierarchy between domestic and EU courts.

As a multi-disciplinary research project, EUTHORITY blends legal analysis with state-of-art empirical methods, including Bayesian statistics, text-mining, online data harvesting and machine learning. We develop formal models of inter-court relations in non-hierarchical settings using game-theoretic assumptions and undertake to collect longitudinal data on the institutional characteristics and doctrinal responses to legal integration of 68 domestic supreme and constitutional courts across the EU 28 Member States. With a view to construct an annual, court-specific index of legal integration, we also conduct an expert survey, the EU Law Barometer, asking academic lawyers and practitioners to assess their courts' attitudes towards EU law.

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