Still Out In the Weekend: Renewing EU Law in Context

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that the triumph of contextual approaches to EU law is more apparent than real (much like the success of law in context in legal scholarship in general). It is true that the use of conceptual tools of other social disciplines to reconstruct, analyse and assess EU law has become widespread. But it is also the case, as I will show in section II , that the increased respectability of interdisciplinary goes hand in hand with the loss of its critical edge. In particular, the limits of law as a means of integration in Europe are rarely explored, there is a tendency to naturalise and familiarise the basic concepts of EU law, and there is a parallel lack of appetite for questioning the basic categories around which research is structured, and, fi nally, we are yet to see the emergence of a research agenda which transcends the interests and concerns of EU Institutions. Such are the bases which in my view require us to double down on contextualism. With such a purpose in view, I put forward the outline of a renewed contextualist agenda for EU legal scholarship that is capable of developing a critical understanding of EU law.