Jasper Krommendijk, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius
6 min
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), based in Luxembourg, is the central institution for interpreting EU law. It consists of the Court of Justice and the General Court. A primary function of the Court of Justice is the preliminary ruling procedure, where national judges refer questions to the CJEU to ensure that EU law is interpreted and applied uniformly across all Member States. Understanding these judgments is essential for grasping how EU law functions in practice.
CJEU judgments can be notoriously dense and difficult for non-experts. Rather than reading a judgment linearly from start to finish, the authors recommend a targeted approach:
To better understand a case, readers should consult the Advocate General’s Opinion, which provides an official, often more detailed, advisory perspective on the case. Additionally, legal blogs and academic commentaries can offer helpful summaries. However, readers must exercise caution: these secondary sources are not binding law, may contain author bias, and should never be cited as the primary authority for what a judgment holds.
Sam: Does this approach generalize across CJEU case types, or is it specific to a particular procedure?
Alex: They focus specifically on the preliminary ruling procedure under Article 267 — where national courts refer questions to the CJEU to ensure uniform interpretation across member states. That's the context where this reading problem is most acute, because the judgments are written to function simultaneously across twenty-seven different legal systems.
Sam: So the legal density isn't incidental — it's functional.
Alex: Exactly. The precision is load-bearing. A ruling has to be interpretable consistently in jurisdictions with very different legal traditions, so every word is doing work. The complexity is a byproduct of that cross-jurisdictional requirement, not bureaucratic excess.
Sam: What's the binding limitation of the heuristic? Because it sounds like it assumes quite a lot of the reader.
Alex: That's the critical constraint. The heuristic assumes the reader already has enough baseline legal literacy to interpret a rephrased dictum. It doesn't simplify EU law — it simplifies the reading path through a judgment. A researcher without that foundation will still struggle, just at a different point in the process. It's a structural workaround for the human reader, not a reduction in the underlying doctrinal complexity.
Sam: So it's a navigation tool, not a translation tool.
Alex: That's a precise way to put it. And the authors are careful not to oversell it. The heuristic gets you oriented faster and reduces the risk of getting lost in procedural history, but it doesn't substitute for genuine engagement with the legal reasoning.
Sam: Does this kind of manual heuristic have a shelf life? LLM-based summarization is moving quickly in the legal domain.
Alex: The authors gesture at this. The most labor-intensive part of the heuristic — de-referencing those dense multi-act citations in the dictum — is exactly the kind of task that LLM-driven agents are beginning to handle. If a system can map the procedural history and substitute plain-language descriptions of each instrument in real time, the need for a manual reading order starts to erode.
Sam: Though the reliability bar for legal research is considerably higher than for most applications.
Alex: Considerably. Until those tools are validated for that level of precision, the manual heuristic remains a meaningful intervention — particularly for researchers who encounter CJEU judgments occasionally rather than as their primary material. It's a way to make an unfamiliar genre legible without waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.
Sam: And that's probably the audience this paper is really written for — the legal-adjacent researcher who needs to read these judgments but wasn't trained to do it.
Alex: Precisely. The CJEU is, as the authors put it, a kind of technical interface problem. The court's output is authoritative and consequential, but the format is optimized for legal professionals working within the system, not for the broader research community that increasingly needs to engage with it. This heuristic is an attempt to close that gap with the tools currently available. Thanks for listening to ResearchPod.