Introduction

This dataset includes information about the rulings by the European Court of Justice from 1960–1997. Each observation in the dataset is a legal issue, which may represent only a part of case. We identified legal issues according to how the Court considered the content of the case in its final decision. That is, if the Court offered separate rulings on two different aspects of the case, then we recorded two legal issues.

For each legal issue, we recorded a variety of descriptive characteristics (e.g., the date of judgment, the identity of the litigants, and the legal basis of the case). The attached codebook provides details about how this information is coded.

Please note that this dataset is part of an ongoing data collection and cleaning project and the current version is only a beta version of the final dataset. We will update this website in the near future to include all rulings from the inception of the ECJ to 2000. The information in the database derives from the Report of Cases Before the Court (Luxembourg: Court of Justice of the European Communities).

Who We Are

Clifford Carruba

Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Emory University

Matthew Gabel

Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Washington University - St. Louis

The authors thank the National Science Foundation, the University of Kentucky, Emory University, and Center for Empirical Research in the Law for funding and assistance in assembling and presenting these data. Any errors or omissions are strictly the responsibility of Professors Carrubba and Gabel.