EU Law Stories: Contextual and Critical Histories of European Jurisprudence

Abstract

In the shadow of multiple crises afflicting the EU in recent years, the contributors to this richly textured volume found themselves shaken by a sense of “existential crisis articulated in EU law scholarship.”1 This perception is not only attributable to EU law’s uncertain fortune as a subject of study in American academia, but also to the growing number of legal scholars questioning the very “raison d’être of the project of European integration.”2 Many of the volume’s contributors “began by feeling self-estranged . . . from the process of European integration” and from a field of law long maligned as self-referential, dogmatic, and formalistic.3 They turned to storytelling in the hopes of breaking the hermetic seal of EU law’s conventional wisdom, inspired by the interdisciplinary and critical promise of the law and society, critical legal studies, and postcolonial studies movements. This move is astute, timely, and compelling. It has become obvious to anyone who has followed the controversies surrounding the Euro-crisis, Brexit, the migration crisis in southern Europe, or the rule of law crisis in Hungary and Poland that European institutions and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are now commonplace objects of storytelling, whether they like it or not. In retrospect, this should have surprised no one. Even Eric Stein’s now-emblematic 1981 phrase with which this volume begins––describing the ECJ as “tucked away in the fairyland Duchy of Luxembourg”4—foreshadows how the hidden and the distant are destined to inspire folklore. EU law was bound to be discovered by politics sooner or later. But what kind of folklore would result?