Agustín Casas visited the NCID to give a seminar about "Checks and Balances and nation Building: The Spanish Constitutional Court and Catalonia". He explained how the decision of the Spanish Constitutional Court on 2010 about the reform of the Catalan Statute increased the pro-independence feeling among many citizens of the region of Catalonia. 

The researcher has published a paper with Anthony Moragas and Federico Curci (CUNEF) that examines whether judicial review can affect nation building by studying how the ruling of the Spanish Constitutional Court on the Catalan Statute affected support for secession, which doubled in the 2010-2012 period. 

According to the research, the people that were interviewed after the publication of the judicial review by the Constitutional Court declared to be more proindependence than the ones that were interviewed before. Consequently, the ruling increased the saliency of the Catalan identity and the trust in institutions decreased among many of the population of the Spanish region.