As You Sow, So Shall You Reap? The Influence of the Referring Court on the Preliminary Ruling of the Court of Justice

The preliminary ruling procedure under Article 267 in the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) provides that the European Court of Justice (ECJ), at the request of national courts in the Member States, can deliver rulings on the interpretation or validity of EU law. Throughout the years the preliminary ruling procedure has given rise to many milestone judgments and some of the most characteristic traits of EU law, most famously the doctrines of supremacy and direct effect.
The objective of the proposed project is to establish whether and to what extent national courts are able to influence the outcome reached by the ECJ by the way they draft their requests for preliminary rulings.