The world plainly is growing smaller and is more subject to empiric evaluation. To me, those are great trends for many reasons, including my preference for facts instead of hearsay and anecdote. So, I follow the Empirical Legal Studies blog. The following post is germane for lawyers around the world seeking to better understand the activities of the European Court of Justice.
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from Empirical Legal Studies by Jason Czarnezki Alec Stone Sweet and Thomas Brunell have posted three data bases, on the activities of the European Court of Justice, and the adjudication of EU law, under Articles 226 (infringement proceedings – brought by the Commission against a Member State), 230 (annulment actions in administrative law brought by individuals and companies against the EU), and 234 (preliminary references from national judges to the ECJ). They collected these data over the course of 12 years, and they are unavailable outside of the Court, which does not provide public access to them. The home for these data is the Robert Schuman Centre, the European University Institute. The datesets, accompanying codebooks, and papers providing summary analyses of the data can be found here: http://www.eu-newgov.org/datalists/deliverables_detail.asp?Project_ID=26. Since 1996, scholars have used these data in a wide variety of research projects, including doctoral dissertations, books, articles in economics, law, sociology, and political science.