Stein Arne Brekke

Judicial Politics in an Age of Democratic Contestation European Consortium for Political Research

We are very excited about our #ecprgc26 Section on "Judicial Politics in an Age of Democratic Contestation" chaired by @thaliagerzso.bsky.social and @johank76.mastodon.nu.ap.brid.gy: ecpr.eu/Events/Event... and hope to see you all in Kraków (8-11 September 2026)!

Empty room at the Court of Justice in Luxembourg

Conmemorative plaque at the Court of Justice for Thomas More. You can see the plaque and the explanation besides it

Table with the agenda of the day and a microphone

🏛️ We have just arrived at @Curia!
💼 Today, our lawyer, Dr. Martin Husovec, will explain to the court why #DMA #interoperability should apply to #Apple in full extent!

👀 Stay tuned for updates! And if you need a quick recap of what's at stake for […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Their findings echo personal experience: Working with hand-coded data on legal issues and doctrine in case law of the European Court of Justice (https://doi.org/10.1177/2755323X251337809) we made serious attempts to replicate our findings using machine learning, but did not manage to create […]

The variation cannot be explained away by the challenges inherent in text annotation: The authors "find no correlation between human inter-annotator agreement and LLM hacking risk, meaning that even for tasks where human experts perfectly agree, LLM-based annotations can yield unreliable […]

While LLMs can be easily abused, good intentions are not going to help us avoid these problems: When statistical significance of real effects creep up towards p=.05, LLM error rates approach 70%. Choices of prompt engineering "contribute less than 1% of explained variance", raising serious […]

Malicious actors can easily manipulate LLMs to reach pretty much any conclusion: In as many as 68% of cases, statistically significant effects could be reversed to display findings diagonally opposed with reality. With slight tweaks they could create false positives in 94% of cases, whereas true […]

Interesting piece from Joachim Baumann and co-authors about replacing humans with LLMs for text annotation for academic purposes. Replicating a handful of published social science studies they find that "with just a handful of prompt paraphrases, virtually anything can be presented as […]

@JosteinSN Det er vanskelig å se for seg ellevill jubel mellom de døde og de utsultede i ruinene. Konseptet fredsavtale spiller på illusjonen av en krig. Dette er bare en pause i et folkemord som Netanyahu har alle intensjoner om å fortsette.

Jeg kan puste mer normalt når nødhjelpen kommer […]

Sure, good thinking! https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17207970

Data on the United Kindgom Supreme Court Open access data on decisions of the UK supreme court, along with replication materials.

I compiled some data on the UKSC some time back for a presentation I was giving on web scraping.

The UKSC changed their web site pretty much immediately after, but I guess the data still holds in case anyone is interested in the UK.
https://brekke.it/?p=data&set=uksc

I'm teaching my judicial politics module at UCL again this term which means that I'm keen on new resources for students. In particular, let me know if you published a dataset on courts/judicial politics/legal mobilization and it is not yet listed here: michalovadek.github.io/judicial-pol...

Sitat-tooten (sitooten?) til Aslak Raanes som den vises på Bluesky, gjennom Bridgy.fed. Den siterte posted til Mastodon-teamet vises som en sitert post på Bluesky, mens posten til Renaud Chaput vises som en lenke til Mastodon siden han ikke har skrudd på bruen til Blluesky.

Det ser ut til at det fungerer fint med Bluesky også. Ikke verst.
@aslakr

Ralph fra the Simpsons smiler forsiktig og vinker til kamera. Det står "I'M HELPING" ovenfor ham i tykke hvite bokstaver.

Forhåndsstemte MDG fra utlandet, det føles godt! @slaeg

I guess this would have to be implemented by @anewsocial . Probably not on top of their priorities, but I'd love to heat it it has been considered.

@johank76 @bsky.brid.gy

@DetersHenning Where is the replication data available from? I can't seem to find it under supplementary materials on Cambridge or on your website under resources. Not that I would need it any time soon - just curious!

@DetersHenning Sad to hear you won't make it to Copenhogen! Hopefully we'll make up for it at some European conference next year.

It always fascinated me how much has been done on very limited information about observations in PR procedures, yet nobody seemed to care about information about […]

Great read! It plays directly into a side project I'm working on myself these days, so the timing is perfect for me: I was planning on writing a paragraph or two about the relationship between authority transfer and politicization today anyway. That should be a lot easier now.

The drop in […]

Table showing the main direct action procedures with litigant constellations and authority dimensions

The take-home message: Overall, mobilization against EU legislation, implementation, and enforcement is growing, but the salience and polarisation of the respective Court proceedings depends on how much authority the EU wielded in these domains in different […]

[Original post on eupolicy.social]

In "Authority transfer and governmental legal contestation before the court of justice of the EU", @jonasbornemann.bsky.social and I ask a simple question. Does the transfer of authority to EU institutions shape Member States' (MS) legal contestation before the Court of Justice of the EU? We […]

Judicial diversity and immigration appeals: evidence from the United Kingdom Almost all studies of judicial behaviour and diversity conceptualise judges’ race and gender as independent, additive variables. Specifically, black and female judges are often seen as more liberal...

I have a new paper out in @wepsocial.bsky.social looking at immigration rulings in the UK (doi.org/10.1080/0140...). It's a short read, but the two main findings are:

1) the success of an immigration appeal depends a lot on who the deciding judge is

2) BAME women are (surprisingly) strict judges

Postdoc and PhD positions (18/24 months) for political scientists/legal scholars in the Rights to Unite project on European Integration and legal mobilisation. #AcademicJobs #CfA #EU #law https://rightstounite.eu/news-events/news/

#Hungary is violating #EU law by cracking down on #LGBTQ+ content children might be exposed to, a top adviser at the European Union’s highest court @Curia said on Thursday.

Hungary “has significantly deviated from the model of a constitutional #democracy,” the Advocate General Ćapeta found […]

The Court of Appeal made this reference after an earlier decision had been overturned by the Supreme Court, and the court was asked to re-evaluate.

It remains to be seen whether the referral sets a precedence, or will remain an outlier in a judiciary with a strong preference for national solutions.

The power of the EFTA Court has traditionally been severely limited, in no small part by the Norwegian judiciary's refusal to refer questions.

The real victory for the Court was not today's publicity, but last year's decision of the Borgarting Court of Appeal to refer its questions the first place.

The EFTA Court similar to the European Court of Justice (#ECJ) in that its main function is not to resolve cases between parties directly: Instead, national courts refer questions to the EFTA Court, whose judgment serves as a response to this question and as the valid interpretation of EU/EEA law.

Greenpeace sought to stop 3 new oil and natural gas fields, claiming that the state failed to conduct a full #environmental impact assessment as required by #EUlaw.

The Court largely agrees with this interpretation, but does not require development of the fields to halt as the assessment is made.

It's a good day for obscure international courts, as the often neglected EFTA Court made front-page news in Norway over its judgment in 'Norwegian State v Greenpeace Nordic'.

The head of #Greenpeace is quoted calling the court "the most important tribunal #Norway must deal with as an EEA country".

For this week in EU politics, Hungary's Viktor Orban backs the losing anti-Hungarian nationalist candidate in Romanian presidential elections and therefore incurs the wrath of a winning Romanian pro-EU coalition that includes the Hungarian minority's UDMR party

Polish non-appointments For years, Poland has refused to appoint judges to the Court of Justice of the European Union. In this blog post, I investigate what is going on with the lack of Polish appointments to the CJEU.

This Sunday, presidential elections offer #Poland a chance to finally rid the Law and Justice party from power. For the Court of Justice, this would mean the end a long standing but rarely discussed blockage of judicial appointments: https://brekke.it/?p=content&id=2024-11-18-Polish_non-appointments

The result of this (incredibly) hard work is now available for all to use, with variables ranging from deference to national courts to legal outcomes.

The full data is available from the IUROPA project:
https://iuropa.pol.gu.se/doctrine-and-legal-outcomes