The Reality of EU Law

• Department of Law

The EUI Constitutionalism and Politics Working Group hosts a session with Floris de Witte (Associate Professor, LSE Law School).

The study of the law of European integration has from its very inception been preoccupied with offering an account of the authority of EU law. The creation of a ‘new legal order’ with its distinct conceptual vocabulary and normative commitments is traditionally seen as an attempt to emancipate EU law from other forms of law whose authority was simultaneously more socially embedded but also normatively problematic. This has led to a large degree of immanence to the study (and more recently critique) of EU law. Even the more critical views on (the authority of) EU law reify the privileged connection between the EU’s legal order and the wider process of European integration. Implicitly or explicitly, it either presumes, celebrates, challenges or disparages the power that law has to alter the nature, scope and direction – in short, the reality – of European integration. What is missing, arguably, is the space between cause and effect: between the EU as a law and as a lived experience, as a socio-material reality. What I am interested in this presentation is to offer a material and relational critique of the study of EU law and its role in the process of European integration, as an attempt to bring the reality 'back in'. One of the possible methodological innovations to do this is to employ the insight of legal geography, which highlights the spatio-temporal contingency of law. I will highlight what this lens makes visible by using a number of examples.

About the speaker:

Floris de Witte is Associate Professor at LSE Law School. His research focuses on the interaction between EU law and politics, as well as on EU legal geography. Floris teaches a range of courses on EU law. He is an affiliated member of the LSE European Institute.