Understanding EU legal integration/disintegration: in search of new perspectives

EUFUTURES Research Network Launch Workshop

This workshop is hybrid (online and in person). If you would like to attend it online, please click on the "Register now" button above. If you would like to attend it in person, please email eufuturesnetwork@gmail.com.

Organisers: Elaine Fahey, Institute for the Study of European law, City Law School, Rebecca Zahn, Strathclyde Law School and Fabien Terpan, Sciences Po, Grenoble

The future of EU legal integration is at a significant juncture with the departure of the UK, substantial rule of law challenges, internal and external crises, and an increasingly apathetic multilateral legal order. There is increased recognition amongst EU lawyers, who have historically limited themselves to doctrinal analysis and legal hermeneutics, that methodology plays an essential role in order to understand EU integration and shape its future.

The question remains though how to connect interdisciplinary approaches to EU law, policy and politics. How should EU law (as an object) be studied? What are the respective merits of each discipline (political science, sociology, economy, history) in explaining the way EU law is created, applied, used, transformed in the process of EU integration? What is the added value of bringing together different approaches to law? In particular, how can EU law (as an academic discipline) open itself up to the methods of the social sciences and what, in return, can law offer to our understanding of EU studies more widely?

In order to answer these questions, EUFutures brings together scholars for this workshop to: reflect on the future methodological direction(s) of EU law and EU integration and consider both how law could open itself up to methodologies from other disciplines, and what legal analysis could offer political, economic and historical approaches.

Programme

Welcome

Time: 08:45

• Elaine Fahey
• Fabien Terpan
• Rebecca Zahn

Keynote

Time: 09:00 – 09:45

Mikael Rask Madsen (University of Copenhagen): Researching the European Court of Justice.

Methodological Shifts and Law's Embeddedness

Interdisciplinary research on EU law 

Time: 10:00 – 11:30

• Paul Copeland (Queen Mary University of London): Beyond the scope of law: Reflections on interdisciplinary research and the challenges of making it happen
• Diamond Ashiagbor (University of Kent): Toward an economic sociology of EU law
• Hugo Canihac (Université Saint Louis Bruxelles) :Historical sociologies and European legal integration: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda
• Adrienne Yong (City, University of London): Critical socio-legal theories in EU citizenship: explicating the gendered elements of free movement
• Amanda Perry-Kessaris (University of Kent): How might designerly ways prompt and facilitate interdisciplinary understandings of EU legal (dis)integration?

Coffee break

Time: 11:30 – 11:45

• Giulia Gentile (LSE) and Luigi Lonardo (University College Cork): Interdisciplinary Research Methods in EU Law: Challenges and Opportunities
• Jan Zglinski (LSE): The end of negative market integration: 60 years of free movement of goods litigation 1961-2020
• Michal Ovádek (UCL) :Is it possible to accurately predict the authorship of judicial decisions from text?
• Konstantinos Alexandris Polomarkakis (University of Exeter): Unseen contributors to legal integration and how to study them
• Danai Petropoulou Ionescu (University of Maastricht): Following the trail: using investigative methods in the Study of EU law

Lunch break

Time: 13:15 – 14:00

Understanding the EU’s integration processes 

Time: 14:00 – 15:30

• Dagmar Schiek (University College Cork): Integration through rights: sociological approaches to law
• Massimo Fichera (University of Turku): Understanding EU Law from the perspective of Constitutional Theory
• Jacob Vandebeeten (LSE): Maastricht and the limits of integration through law: bits and pieces of a legal ideology
• Giulio Kowalski (City, University of London): The role of business model differentiation in the enforcement of the Digital Markets Act: A methodological perspective
• Marie-Pierre Granger (Central European University), Angelina Atanasova (European Social Observatory), Maximilian Reymann (EUI): From criminals to judges under threat: the evolving empirical foundations of the CJEU rule of law rulings

Coffee break

Time: 15:30 – 15:45

Understanding EU law through soft law, discourse, ideas & beliefs 

Time: 15:45 – 16:30

• Monika Brusenbauch Meislová (Masaryk University):Discursive reconstruction of Brexit and the UK in the EU Soft Law 2016-2022
• Xinchuchu Gao (LSE), Xuechen Chen (New College of the Humanities): Assessing the EU's normative power through the lens of soft law difussion: a case study of the EU's promotion of economic norms in ASEAN
• Salvatore Barilla (University of Edinburgh): Ideas in international trade: the role of programmatic beliefs in the EU and China's approaches to the WTO DSM

Closing and future plans 

Time: 16:30 – 16:45

Wine reception

Time: 16:45 – 18:00

DRAFT WORKSHOP PROGRAMME

In-person attendees will be sent location details.