National Judicial Review of EU Law Enforcement: Challenges in Creating the EU Competition Law Judicial Review Database

Although national courts are the primary forum for the application of EU law, only very few studies have empirically examined their operation in practice and their impact on the EU vertical model of judicial federalism. Various unique challenges stand in the way of creating a multi-country multi-court database of the national judicial review of EU law enforcement, including technical barriers (e.g., limited publications, weak open judicial data practices; legal restrictions imposed on the analysis of judicial data; and the variety of European languages and legal traditions) and substantive difficulties (national divergences emerging from the EU principle of procedural and institutional autonomy). This article introduces and shares our experience in constructing the Competition Law Judicial Review Database, the first EU-wide database exploring the operation and effectiveness of the national judicial review of EU and national competition law enforcement by national competition authorities. Following the collective efforts of twenty-eight national teams of experts applying systematic content analysis, this new and original database encodes case- and jurisdiction-level information from all publicly available national judgments reviewing the application of EU and national competition law prohibitions (May 2004–April 2021).