Who Is Afraid of Empirical Legal Studies in EU Law?
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Empirical legal studies have arrived in EU law, and with them a remarkable range of new tools, questions and insights. Over the past decade, quantitative and qualitative social science methods have begun to illuminate aspects of the EU legal order that traditional scholarship could not easily reach: how courts reason and decide, how legal rules impact on real-world behaviour, how institutions interact beyond the formal record. The result is a richer, more complete and accurate picture of what EU law is and how it works.
This talk introduces Empirical Legal Studies in EU Law (Cambridge University Press, 2026), a landmark volume mapping the state of the art in this fast-growing field. Drawing on Jan Zglinski's opening chapter, it makes the case for what empirical research contributes to the study of EU law: putting conventional wisdoms to the test, opening up research questions that doctrinal analysis alone cannot answer, and broadening our very conception of the field. Rather than displacing existing approaches, empirical legal studies enrich them – offering EU law scholars new ways of asking old questions and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to ask entirely new ones.
The volume is available open access at cambridge.org.
A light lunch will be available in front of Seminar Room F. This is a hybrid event. Those who wish to attend the event on Microsoft Teams should kindly reach out to Amelie Berz: amelie.berz@law.ox.ac.uk.
