Strategic use of extra judicial citations at the European Court of Justice

An important literature demonstrates how courts respond to adverse political environments by strategically crafting their judgments to make them more efficacious. One prominent strategy is to use citations to their own case law to increase the legitimacy of the rulings. By contrast, we know less about how courts strategically engage with one of their most crucial compliance constituencies -- the legal academy. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring theoretical perspectives on the role of legal academic community for compliance and discussing expected observable implications of these accounts by studying the citation behaviour of the most public facing members of the European Court of Justice, the Advocates General. In a departure from earlier findings regarding courts' reliance on precedent, when analysing novel data on extrajudicial citations I find no association between their use and whether the legal position taken is in line with the will of member states. Instead, case salience appears to play a more important role in deciding to use court resources on engaging with legal scholarship. Taken together, I argue these findings suggest that members of the Court use citations to academic work to legitimate the court in the eyes of a key audience and mobilize an important compliance constituency.