Measuring the Influence of the Advocate General on the Court of Justice of the European Union: Correlation or Causation?

A quick search on The Guardian webpage reveals that it is commonly acknowledged that the Advocate General influences the Court, or that the Court follows the opinions of the Advocates General. Even conversations amongst EU lawyers, practitioners and academics alike are often based on the omnipresent presumption that the Advocate General influences the Court, which seems to have become a truth by repetition. However, has data been put forward proving this dogma? Is it true that the Advocates General opinions have such an important weight in the judgments of the Court? Answering these questions becomes more relevant than ever as the number of Advocates General increases, and so does the workload of the Court.

Answers to these questions are precisely what the authors set out to discover in a recent study ‘An Econometric Analysis of the Influence of the AdvocateGeneral on the Court of Justice of the European Union’, available on SSRN, and published in the Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law (2016) 5(1).