Subnational disparities in EU law use: exploring the GEOCOURT dataset

We present a new dataset compiling the geographic coordinates of the entire universe of courts that have passed on cases to the European Court of Justice over the lifetime of the European Union. The GEOCOURT Dataset allows the exploration of spatial disparities and clustering effects across time, member states and tiers of courts. Exploration of our new dataset reveals that involvement in the preliminary ruling procedure tends to be concentrated in a relatively small subset of regions within member states, often the region hosting the country's capital. We also consider several regional attributes associated with Article 267 use, which point out avenues for future research. Controlling for country and region fixed effects, we show that peak courts, GDP, population and capital along with with indicators of economic well-being and integration in cross-border trade are positively associated with referral propensity.