CREATe’s seventh Working Paper of 2015 is now available to download. Is There a EU Copyright Jurisprudence? An Empirical Analysis of the Workings of the European Court of Justice by Marcella Favale, Martin Kretschmer and Paul C. Torremans explores suspicions that the European Court of Justice has been carrying out a harmonising agenda over and beyond the conventional law-interpreting function of the judiciary. This study aims to investigate empirically two theories in relation to the development of EU copyright law: (i) that the Court has failed to develop a coherent copyright jurisprudence (lacking domain expertise, copyright specific reasoning, and predictability); (ii) that the Court has pursued an activist, harmonising agenda (resorting to teleological interpretation of European law rather than – less discretionary – semantic and systematic legal approaches).
The paper will be presented at the forthcoming European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Conference, being hosted by CREATe at the University of Glasgow from 1 – 3 September 2015.
A version of this paper has been accepted for publication by Modern Law Review (2016 Forthcoming). It is also available on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2643699.