Antoine Vauchez famously stated that the “constitutionalization of Europe” flourished in the hills of Fiesole. More recently, Bruno de Witte has traced the EUI’s contribution to successive “European constitutional imaginaries”, emerging not from a single “Florence School” but from evolving communities of scholars. European society is one of them – and has been a theme of one very particular setting: the EUI Summer Courses.

The Academy of European Law (AEL) at the European University Institute, founded by Joseph Weiler and Antonio Cassese, organizes an annual Summer Course on the Law of the European Union for two weeks of intensive lectures and exchange. The programme is structured around three components: a General Course, Specialized Courses, and a Distinguished Lecture, and concludes with a voluntary diploma examination. Together, they offer advanced discussions on topics and frameworks of EU law.

In 2026, Professor Katerina Linos delivered the General Course, “From Brexit to Breakthrough: The European Union’s Unlikely Renaissance,” offering a generally optimistic account of the Union’s trajectory. The specialized courses were dedicated to “European Union Law and Social Conflict”, and explored one of the central challenges facing European integration today: how should EU law respond to social conflicts in an increasingly fragmented Europe?

Although European society was not the explicit theme of the Summer Course, together with the values enshrined in Art. 2, it repeatedly surfaced throughout the discussions. Whether analysing migration, housing, or the constitutional significance of Commission v Hungary, participants returned to questions of how European society is constituted through conflict, who belongs to it, and what role EU law should play within it.

In this blog post, I reflect on this year’s Summer Course as a site where ideas of European society are debated, contested, and further developed. I will analyse this via two vantage points: the people who came together at Villa Salviati and the themes that structured the discussions. Ultimately, I will critically reflect on what the Summer Course might tell us about the future of EU law.

The People: A Community of (Future) Interpreters

Dimitri Spieker draws, in his contribution to this symposium, on Peter Häberle’s notion of “a European society of constitutional interpreters.” The frame is equally apt for the Summer Course, itself a microcosm of the broader European community of (future) legal interpreters. In 2026, this microcosm was defined by three basic elements: diversity, a shared interest in EU law, and critical engagement with the future of the Union.

From a demographic perspective, roughly one-third of participants were doctoral researchers, complemented by sizable groups of practitioners and students, established academics and judges, or judicial trainees. Roughly three-fifths came from EU Member States, the rest mostly from non-EU countries with close academic or professional ties to the EU. The majority of participants were women, largely at the beginning of their academic or professional careers. Ideologically, discussions suggested less political than professional diversity, with almost all participants broadly supportive of the European project and often identifying with progressive political positions. Yet, in terms of the future outlook of the Union, participants showed a deep commitment to the European project while holding rather critical positions to its current trajectory. For instance, when, on the last day of the course, participants were asked whether they felt optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the European Union, only one person identified as optimistic.

Virginia Passalacqua’s lectures on legal mobilization offered a great opportunity for introspection of this microcosm of (future) interpreters. Drawing on the work of Antoine Vauchez and Tommaso Pavone, and the figure of the Eurolawyer, she shifted attention away from the Court itself towards the actors who bring social conflicts before it. Through case studies ranging from Van Gend en Loos to Defrenne, she demonstrated that landmark judgments do not emerge from a vacuum, but are the product of mobilization by lawyers, academics, Commission officials, and other legal entrepreneurs. Equally revealing, she argued, are the conflicts that never reach Luxembourg, inviting participants to reflect on the conditions that enable or hinder legal mobilization. Interestingly, as she analyzed the role of these actors in shaping EU law, she was also speaking to many of those who aspire to occupy precisely those roles, triggering essential questions of professional responsibility.

Social Conflict and the Making of European Society

European society was not the explicit focus of the course, but served as its spectre, especially after the Court’s pronouncement in Commission v Hungary. Throughout the Summer Course, several connections to the questions underlying the research agenda in European society became apparent.

First, on the choice of this year’s explicit frame: conflict. Conflict is central to society. Loïc Azoulai, whose lecture opened the course and set the tone for many of the formal and informal discussions amongst the participants, focused on the changing structure of conflicts in Europe. For him, contemporary conflicts are increasingly affective, amplified by digital media and embedded in everyday social relations. Consequently, EU law is itself changing: it no longer merely organizes integration between states but increasingly operates as the law of a European social formation, prompting the question whether it remains capable of transforming deep political conflict into a common legal order. The concept of conflict as constitutive of society is also central to Armin von Bogdandy, who taught the General Course in 2013 and was presenting ideas that later shaped his work on the structural transformation of public law in Europe and, ultimately, European society.

Second, one of the most discussed judgments throughout the course was Commission v Hungary, serving as an important reference point for participants throughout the two weeks. Notably, Commission v Hungary was not treated as an unquestioned success – much like this symposium itself, whose contributions reflect a similarly mixed reception (see also here, here, and here). While there was broad agreement that the Hungarian LGBTQ+ legislation itself was unacceptable, the discussion moved to challenging constitutional questions: Why did the Court invoke Article 2 TEU in this case, but not in earlier rule of law or fundamental rights disputes? What does it mean for the Court to speak in the name of European society? And what are the constitutional implications of relying on common values as a basis for judicial intervention? While some participants welcomed Commission v Hungary as an important constitutional development, seeing the values enshrined in Article 2 TEU as a shared vocabulary through which the Union can articulate and defend its fundamental commitments, others were more skeptical. They questioned whether the judgment reflects an increasingly activist Court and warned that invoking European society was yet another device allowing judges to constitutionalize contested social questions and place them outside the realm of politics. Some even went as far as criticizing the Court for engaging in a form of identity politics.

Third, the lectures shared a common methodological orientation. Rather than treating EU law as an autonomous legal order, they placed it within the social, political, and historical contexts in which it operates. The focus shifted from doctrine to lived experiences, and from abstract legal principles to the conflicts, inequalities, and power structures through which European society is constituted. European society was therefore presented less as another concept to be mastered than as a methodological sensibility: an invitation to look beyond institutions and doctrines, to centre society in the analysis of EU law, and to ask how law is experienced, contested and transformed by those living under it. In this sense, the lectures reflected what has been described in this symposium as European society as a method.

Consequently, society was ever-present, but never defined, nor engaged with as a constitutional concept. Discussions of Commission v Hungary focused more on the values of Article 2 TEU rather than on the Court’s mentioning of society itself. This reluctance also mirrored a deeper disagreement that was never resolved: is European society a lens through which to read EU law, or an ongoing process, constituted through conflict and never settled enough to be applied? At times, one had the sense that participants were talking past one another, deploying “society” as though it meant the same thing while in fact operating with quite different concepts of it. Could this discreet avoidance of engaging with society in its face not be incidental? The Summer Course is itself a site of constitutionalization: a forum in which certain concepts are elevated, debated, and given intellectual legitimacy among the next generation of scholars and practitioners. To address society explicitly would risk repeating the very gesture for which participants criticized the Court: elevating a contested concept into a constitutional reference point.

A Site of Vergesellschaftung

The Summer Course is not just a forum for discussing European society, but itself a site of Vergesellschaftung: a process that produces the very community of scholars engaged with the subject. With Armin von Bogdandy’s General Course and Loïc Azoulai’s Chair in Law and Social Europe, European society as a research agenda is itself shaped by the discussions in Villa Salviati. While we are lacking empirical data, many scholars and practitioners working on EU law today have passed through the AEL Summer Course. In this sense, the course functions as something of a rite of passage for the field. This invites reflections on three dimensions: who is included in the process, what is being taught, and what this suggests about the direction of the field.

On the one hand, this year’s focus on marginalization, colonial legacies, and intersectionality may help cultivate a generation of Eurolawyers with fewer epistemic blind spots than those before it. On the other hand, the Summer Course’s own format invites scrutiny. The course fee is substantial, and two weeks in Florence presuppose institutional funding or personal means that not everyone has access to. As one participant noted, the course costs almost as much as a full master’s programme at their domestic university. If European society is constituted by those who mobilize, litigate, and interpret it, then who can afford to be trained into that role is itself a question of who belongs to it. This is, of course, not unique to summer schools but runs through legal education more broadly. The AEL has taken a step in this direction by offering an online course at a reduced fee this year. However, this approach still excludes online participants from engaging in much of the informal exchange that is central to the course.

On a conceptual level, the Summer Course on EU Law remains, compared to its sister course on Human Rights, more conservative in teaching style. While the latter has experimented with more novel formats, incorporating exercises such as dance into its sessions, the EU Law course has largely kept to a classic classroom setting. Yet it, too, is evidently evolving away from a purely doctrinal register. The classes drew on sociology and political theory alongside legal analysis, introducing students to concepts often absent from domestic legal education, and raising a generation of lawyers trained not only in doctrine but in reading EU law through its social and political dimensions. This shift was also visible in who was teaching, with the courses being delivered not only by established professors but also by researchers in earlier career stages.

Looking at this microcosm also raises a further question about where the field itself is heading. Does the composition of this year’s cohort, largely female participants with critical perspectives, point to the future direction of EU legal scholarship? Or does the relative homogeneity of views instead suggest a quieter fragmentation, in which distinct scholarly circles increasingly speak within, rather than across, themselves? At the end of the two weeks, one participant summarized her impression of the course by observing that “in Europe, we’re all in the same boat, but we tend to row in opposite directions.” But isn’t that what society is?

I would like to thank Silvia Steininger and Jasper Siegert, as well as my fellow Summer Course participants Carolina Batista and Natia Girsiashvili, for their helpful comments.