Marco Goldoni
The study of European Union Law from the perspective of Law and Political Economy (LPE) offers valuable insights from two perspectives. This post shows that on the one hand, LPE as a scholarly movement provides a critical framework for analysing fundamental legal aspects of the EU’s political economy and brings to the debate a much needed renewal of the importance of the critique of the political economy. On the other hand, investigating the EU from a perspective sensitive to LPE analysis is also a potentially enriching challenge for the scholarly movement itself.
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Antoine Vauchez
What is therefore needed is a much thicker description of the current phase of semantic destabilization. This implies to build a new questionnaire able to grasp the dynamics of contemporary legal controversies allowing to bring historical depth and socio-legal […] While there is certainly a large variety of methodologies able to address this questionnaire, […] I contend however that a socio-genetic approach is better equipped when it comes to unpack the notion of “context” and reconstitute the complex “hermeneutic space” of legal concepts that continuously move back and forth from the legal and the political fields.
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Moritz Schramm
Have you ever wondered why a legal text is the way it is, or whether its implementation actually works as intended? Typically, one would approach such questions by consulting existing textual material. If one is extraordinary inquisitive, one might even file access-to-document requests. However, sometimes one cannot escape the feeling that something is missing. In that situation, I suggest, one should do the obvious: talk to people who know better – ideally, the people working on or embodying the phenomenon one intends to research.
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Signe Rehling Larsen
On 9 May 1831, a young French aristocrat trained as lawyer arrived in Rhode Island for a nine-months visit to the United States. Officially tasked by the French government with studying the American prison system, his ambition and desire for political and literary fame propelled him to conduct a much broader study of the character of the American Republic. Based on his observations, the young lawyer wrote Democracy in America; a book that holds as much insight about the European Union today as it did about the early American Republic back then.
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Fernanda G. Nicola
The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) stands as a central institution in the European legal and political landscape. Its judgments not only shape the trajectory of European integration but also reveal deeper EU Law Stories – ideological clashes, conflicting narratives and distributive consequences with the subtle emergence of winners and losers in each case. Yet, these dimensions often remain hidden behind the opaque language of the increasingly lengthy rulings and traditional doctrinal analysis.
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Afroditi Marketou
Law can be viewed not as a universal (or European) science but, following Geertz, as local knowledge. To illustrate the relevance of this perspective for understanding EU law, its effects, and the limits of integration through law, this text draws on the findings of a “classical” comparative study on the application of proportionality as an EU law principle in three national contexts: France, England, and Greece. This type of approach has the potential to evolve – and indeed is already evolving – into an interdisciplinary exploration of the diverse ways in which EU law is understood, applied, and experienced in settings as varied as the Paagalayiri market in Ouagadougou, the train-line connection between Paris and Marseille, or the camp of Moria on Lesvos.
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Jennifer Orlando-Salling
In EU legal studies, time, space, place, and knowledge are locations for contestation, deliberation and reconstruction. Other submissions in this symposium have elaborated on the limitations in understanding and accounting for the ‘what was’ as a fundamental blind spot of EU law. Extending from this starting point, I will show how decolonial approaches can bridge the gap between history, theory, and action, offering practical and alternative solutions for reconciliation. To do so, I will use the rule of law as one such site for contestation.
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Laure Clément-Wilz
This post emphasizes the human factor as a critical method of analysis for legal scholars specializing in European Union law. The aim is to critically analyse the evolution of the rules governing the CJEU, shedding light on its composition, organization, and functioning, while also proposing reform initiatives. Some of these reforms prioritize greater transparency within the CJEU. Furthermore, by focusing on the human factor in EU law, this method reveals how individuals are positioned within the institution, helping to identify potential phenomena of invisibility or exclusion in decision-making processes.
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Päivi Johanna Neuvonen
Critique has become one of the latest buzzwords in EU legal studies. Who, after all, would not want to be identified as a critical scholar if the danger is that one’s work might otherwise be labelled as reactionary, unsophisticated, naïve or whatever other signifier could be used to demolish the value of scholarly enterprise? But the down-side of this growing interest in being critical as an EU law scholar is that the idea of critique itself is in danger of becoming inflated.
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Vincent Réveillère
Since the publication of last year’s symposium “Controversies over Methods in EU Law”, methodological issues are still pervading contemporary debates in EU law. These ongoing controversies over methods in EU law reflect a broader rethinking of the discipline, influenced by multiple crises in the European Union. These crises have led scholars to question their relationship with the European institutions, which have been central to the development of the core concepts of EU law and of EU law as a disciplinary field.
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