Towards a Computational Turn in European Migration Law

European Migration Law (EML) presents a challenge for legal research. The law is formally unitary, yet in practice highly fragmented, and we lack a clear understanding of how its different elements legally interact and shape decision-making. This chapter introduces computational methods to overcome traditional mono-disciplinary constraints in cognising how EML operates in overlapping legal frameworks. Section 19.1 introduces computational legal method as a growing field of research in EU law and outlines some of the principal applications of case law analysis. Section 19.2 profiles a new agenda for researching legal normative interactions in EML through case-citation network analysis. Section 19.3 investigates what is to be gained from using machine-learning methods to explore outcome variance on migration decisions in EU member states. Section 19.4 concludes by reflecting on some of the limitations of our computational legal research and underscores the need to maintain an ethical approach when dealing with normative subjects.