National constitutional courts’ use of the ECJ's precedents: The case study of Czechia

This article interrogates how Member States’ constitutional courts make use of the case-law of the European Court of Justice. Instead of focusing on the extreme instances of open backlash, we put forward a data-driven methodological approach to the study of Europeanization of national constitutional courts. Drawing on the use of automatic text analysis, we suggest that searching for the formal citations of the rulings of the European Court of Justice in the constitutional courts’ case-law contributes to nuanced understanding of their role within the EU. By means of a case study of the Czech Constitutional Court's case-law (more than 71 000 decisions issued between the years 2004 and 2022), we demonstrate a way to explore the so far under-researched area of EU law adjudication where the majority of strategic behaviour might be taking place.