This event features a discussion with EUI visiting PhD Sofie Fleerackers, EUI Simone Veil fellow Prof. Sabine Saurugger, Prof. Fabien Terpan and Sophia Moran.
Strategic litigation has become an increasingly prominent tool for European interest groups over the past two decades. While litigation strategies have been extensively studied in the United States and within Anglo-Saxon political science since the 1960s, scholarship on the European context remains more recent and fragmented. Similarly, the interplay between such (strategic) litigation and political lobbying has received little scholarly attention to date – a gap most notable from the perspective of corporate interests and their (Euro-)lawyers. This event brings together perspectives from political science and law through two presentations on data privacy and IP policy, exploring who litigates, why, and to what effect.
'Explaining Litigation Strategies of Interest Groups – from a Pilot Study on the Schrems cases to a Research Agenda'. Sabine Saurugger, Fabien Terpan, and Sophia Moran firstly present findings from a pilot study explaining the success of public interest litigation in EU-US data transfers – the Schrems cases. . Based on these results, they introduce a series of hypotheses from a broader research agenda analysing litigation strategies across policy sectors, organizational types, and institutional contexts between 2010 and 2025.
'Corporate Litigation as Political Influence in EU Intellectual Property Policy'. Sofie Fleerackers moves beyond the judicial arena and examines how corporate actors combine litigation and lobbying in shaping the EU framework on supplementary protection certificates (SPCs). Drawing on preliminary findings following interview and case law analysis, the presentation lays out industry networks and tactical choices which reveal litigation’s agenda-setting and policy-making power beyond its role as an ex post enforcement mechanism.
Speakers: Sabine Saurugger is EUI Simone Veil Fellow, professor of political sciences and former rector of Sciences Po Grenoble.
Fabien Terpan is professor of EU law at Sciences Po Grenoble.
Sophia Moran is research assistant at the CNRS, Pacte.
Sofie Fleerackers is visiting EUI PhD, MSCA Doctoral Fellow in International and European Law at the University of Amsterdam (ACELG) and PhD Fellow at KU Leuven.
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