What Can Non-judicial (Legal) Data Tell about the Politics of EU Law?

Legal debates within and between the EU institutions are highly influential for their policy choices. Yet, little is known about the legal advice that underscores them. The EU institutions restrict access to this legal data; usually, the only point of access is individual requests under the EU’s public access legislation, Regulation No 1049/2001. This source of legal data has been vastly underused in EU legal scholarship. This chapter addresses the key question of access to non-judicial legal data from the Council and the Commission. Following the critical tradition, the chapter treats EU law primarily as a language of argumentation that enables various interpretations and uses internal legal data as a source of highlighting the political choices involved in legal argumentation – a key endeavour of empirical research in law and institutions. The chapter first outlines the object of inquiry: what legal data exists in the institutions. It then gives examples of how access to documents requests can be systematically used as a method for collecting legal data. This may include confrontations, such as initiating proceedings before the EU Courts and the Ombudsman, which are explored with reference to the author’s own cases. The chapter also raises concern about the future possibilities to study the handling of legal questions within the institutions, increasingly threatened by the problem of empty archives.