Study title

The project participants analyse the 40 leading judgments of each of the 7 Nordic supreme courts. We limited the number of analysed judgments in order to be able to require the project participants to deliver an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the judgments. The project participants have been instructed to use the ‘expert method’ for the selection of leading cases, a method often applied in social sciences. By leading cases we mean the ‘canon of cases’ that they consider to be the ‘most well-known’ or ‘most important’ within the legal (scholarly and/or judicial) community. Thus, the project participants are supposed to guess about the general (mainstream) scholarly opinion on the list of 40 leading judgments. Possible proxies for the selection are: (1) cases that are typically included in a textbook on domestic constitutional law, (2) cases that are frequently cited in scholarly literature, and (3) cases that are often relied upon as precedents by the analysed court itself. None of these three proxies is, however, decisive in itself. The selection shall take into careful consideration a combination of all three factors. There is no time frame, so as a rule even very old cases may be included in the list, if they are still considered to be relevant and influential today. We assume that a relative consensus usually exists as to what decisions constitute leading judgments. To enhance the list’s accuracy, each project participant was also required to designate five constitutional law scholars of their own jurisdiction to review her choice of cases. The texts of the judgment were retrieved from official domestic databases of case-law. They have not been downloaded or stored by the project participants.

Non-probability: Purposive