The adoption of foreign case law by the Greek courts and the emergence of the Existenzminimum doctrine by numbers - Between constitutional interpretation and legitimacy

Abstract The study is divided in two major parts. First, a presentation of the history of the Greek legal order and the organization of the judicial system with a focus on the judicial system of control of constitutionality highlights the legal culture regarding the use of foreign precedents in constitutional cases, describes the complexities regarding the exercise of control of constitutionality, and justifies the reasons that the constitutional case law of the Council of State (CoS) is selected for quantitative measurement. Second, the study analyses from a quantitative and qualitative perspective the results of the measurement of the number of explicit citations in foreign precedents in the constitutional cases of the CoS. It is worth noting that the majority of the citations in German case law refer to the case law of the Existenzminimum , a finding that is being approached from a qualitative perspective too.