The making of the EU’s rule of law policy: who, when and how are driving judicial innovations in the European Court of Justice?

Over the past decade, scholarship on the Rule of Law Crisis (ROLC) has sought to explain the EU’s institutional responses through the behavior of its main institutions or a combination of them. However, recent scholarship has highlighted a genuine revolution mounted by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) caselaw’s judicial innovations. This shift towards the EU’s judicial arena affords access points to actors beyond unitary EU institutions. In turn, this paper asks , *who are driving the tectonic shift in the EU’s rule of law policy?* To complement dominant approaches explaining EU’s policymaking which focus on the Commission’s agenda-setting powers, the autonomy of the Court, or the revealed positions of Member States. This paper subdivides the agency of the Commission into its Directorate-Generals (for infringement procedures) and endows agency to the referring Member State courts (for preliminary references). Through a multi-method analysis of an original dataset of all rule-of-law-related cases before the ECJ from 2010 through 2024 (ECJ-ROL) joint with the European Union Infringement Procedure (EUIP) dataset (Cheruvu & Fjestul, 2023), I map in time the legal claims brought by the the actors behind the making of judicial innovations and assess their relative agency. These results provide an empirical assessment of how the locus of judicial innovation operates within a multilevel system.