Since the foundation of the European Union, the amount of EU law law facing national courts has skyrocketed. The question is, however, how national courts respond to this development. Do they engage themselves in some kind of European legal dialogue, pushing towards increased (legal) integration in Europe? Or, at the other extreme, do they largely ignore the rising amount of European Court of Justice case law? Since the Higher Courts (Supreme and Constitutional Courts) hear more complex cases as compared to the lower instances – most importantly cases related to the compatibility between European and national law – the behavior of Higher Courts seems especially important in this regard. Although these questions are crucial in order to comprehend the dynamics of integration Europe, the literature still lacks a systematic investigation into diverse impact of European Union law in national higher courts and the factors leading to the openness/receptiveness of national courts to European jurisprudence. Why do some national Higher Courts apparently cite the jurisprudence of the CJEU than others? Based on a comparative quantitative data on CJEU citations from higher courts from almost all EU Member States, this paper sets out to investigate exactly this question.
