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 EDITORIAL

These lines start on Page 1 of Issue 1 of Volume 1 of European Law Open, and are written with a sense of occasion of new beginnings, and in deep gratitude for the support of the academic community and the trust placed in us by Cambridge University Press. Launching a new open access journal of European law in times of COVID-19, economic slumps and widespread financial pressures on higher education is not a decision to be taken lightly, and it has not been taken lightly.

Surely, there is a place, indeed a need, for contextual and critical approaches to European law. Many of us have dedicated years to fostering such work as editors and Board members of a certain other journal in another place, which we left collectively in early 2020. It is a heritage we are proud of, and a tradition we will build on. It is also clear, however, that over the decades – in no small measure thanks to that other journal – contextual approaches have become mainstream in EU law, and that, as a consequence, ‘European law in context’ as a description of a particular style of scholarship has lost much of its clarity and purpose. Not entirely in jest, we sometimes joke that the new frontier, the really cool, edgy stuff in EU law these days would consist of good old-fashioned doctrinal work. If only it existed.

The pressing need, we think, is not so much for a journal championing a particular kind of scholarship, but for a journal that takes scholarship seriously. This means three things to us. First, we seek to foster work that interrogates, questions, and unsettles rather than asserting, reifying, and sanctioning. Second, we want to give scholarship space to breathe- literally, by encouraging long, long articles, and figuratively, by privileging ‘slow’, well crafted, fully matured work. And third, we want to nurture a community of scholars that actively engages with each other and each other’s work.

European Law Open (ELO) is a new journal that will be home to scholars engaged in various ways of ‘doing law’. A home for legal scholars engaged in legal-doctrinal approaches as much as for those who find themselves walking the twilight area of interdisciplinarity – the classic case of neither “legal enough” nor “historical, philosophical, political, etc. enough” – daring to deal with subjects which have been so far neglected or insufficiently considered in European law scholarship. We are convinced of the need for a critical revision of the categories, tools and principles that have informed the work of academics, judges and lawyers, and shaped our collective understanding of EU law. Thus, European Law Open will confront the normative principles, institutional structures, decision-making processes and substantive values that purportedly found the Union and shape its law. It will inquire into the extent to which they remain solid or have been scarred by the diverse trajectories and, perhaps, fragmentation that EU law has witnessed in the past decades and by the changing contexts in which it has developed. ELO will also foster analyses that assess the contribution of legal scholarship to the creation and solidification of the current prevailing understandings of EU law, with a view to persistently question the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning EU law (the “dogmas” of EU law).

European Law Open is dedicated to exploring Europe’s role regarding some of the most urgent issues and problems that the world faces today. Climate emergency, health, care, environment, race and racialisation, labour, democracy, (post)colonialism (in more ways than one, empire never ended), gender, migration, globalisation, digitalisation, populism etc. are just some examples of the questions which require the openness that ELO fosters. We believe that European law and scholarship – broadly understood – has an important role to play in this regard. Not only is the European Union a major actor that has significant impacts – both positive and