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Research Plan

The Court of Justice in the Archives project is currently working with 12 cases whose dossiers have been redacted and released. These cases cover the Community Law areas of:

  • free movement of workers; Case 41/74, van Duyn and Case 149/79, Commission v Belgium
  • free movement of goods; Case 8/74, Dassonville
  • judicial procedure and access to justice; Case 25/62, Plaumann and Case 244/80, Foglia v Novello
  • gender equality; Case 43/75, Defrenne II
  • the powers of the institutions; Case 9/56, Meroni I and Case 10/56, Meroni II
  • the constitutional structure; Case 106/77, Simmenthal
  • external relations; Opinion 1/75 and Case 22/70, ERTA
  • competition law; Joined Cases 56/64 and 58/64, Consten and Grundig v Commission
Undated picture of Éliane Vogel-Polsky.
© Archive Centre on Women’s History (CARHIF). Undated picture of Éliane Vogel-Polsky who together with Marie-Thérèse Cuvelliez represented Gabrielle Defrenne. In an interview many years later Vogel-Polsky stated that: ’En 1967, j’étais encore la seule à être convaincue de l’applicabilité directe de cet article [119]. J’avais écrit des tas d’articles que j’avais envoyés à tous mes collègues juristes européens, mais ils me souriaient, me répondaient aimablement… j’étais vraiment la féministe de service que son féminisme aveuglait! Je ne méritais même pas d’être citée contre dans leurs ouvrages. J’étais folle furieuse!’ Read more:‘Agir pour les droits des femmes’ (2003) 10 Raisons politiques 142.
Judge Riccardo Monaco, Judge Robert Lecourt and President of the Commission Franco Maria Malfatti (1970).
© European Communities, 1970, EC Audiovisual Services. Judge Riccardo Monaco, Judge Robert Lecourt and President of the Commission Franco Maria Malfatti (1970). While Robert Lecourt was president of the ECJ the Court decided the case C-43/75 Defrenne II. Paragraph 12 of that judgement read: ’This double aim [of Article 119], which is at once economic and social, shows that the principle of equal pay forms part of the foundations of the Community.’

The case dossiers that have been selected all still resonate in contemporary EU judging and legal scholarship. They span from the early judgments of the Court to the end of the period for which the archives are open. They cover a range of ways of gaining access to the Court of Justice: preliminary references, annulment actions, applications for interim measures, inter-institutional litigation, infringement proceedings and Opinions. Therefore, we have selected the dossiers of cases which remain influential and which exhibit useful variations along a range of characteristics of theoretical interest.

In April 2019 the project recruited 11 late-stage doctoral researchers and in June 2019 the project organised a Master Classwhere these researchers were introduced to the different disciplinary approaches that this project wishes to deploy. The project board consist of professors with expertise in the Court of Justice from different disciplinary vantage-points and they will oversee the research conducted by the project researchers.

The project’s researchers have carried out their analyses of the dossiers during autumn 2019, and have written a report on each dossier. The reports focus on what the dossiers contain, and provide answers to the question of what added-value these dossiers have as research material for a better understanding of the development of the Court of Justice’s jurisprudence. In order to fine-tune the researcher’s methodological skills, Morten Rasmussen (October 2019) and Antoine Vauchez (January 2020) have conducted discussion seminars on historical and sociological approaches to archival research with the project’s members. The reports will be presented by the project’s researchers and discussed by the project’s managers, board and invited researchers during a workshop organised at the EUI in February 2020.