From the 1960s to the 1990s, the politics of law literature considered the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to be the most activist international court. While these studies have allowed the emergence of a very dynamic research field, the answers to the question of how to measure the Court’s activism are still based on very heterogeneous methodological approaches, situated between large-scale quantitative (mostly political science) research, and legal case-by-case textual analysis. Reflecting this heterogeneity, the current answers to this question are equally heterogeneous, reaching from activism to self-restraint.
The aim of our paper is to present a methodological approach that allows for combining a legal and a political science perspective. In applying both a textual analysis and a State power approach (via the analysis of amicus briefs) we attempt to overcome a series of shortcomings the paper will identify in both the legal and political science literature.
