Page:ELO 1(1), 1–5. Introducing European Law Open.pdf/2

2  Editorial negative – on all the mentioned concerns and problems, but its laws and institutions have played an important role in both ushering some of the current challenges and can hopefully contribute to solving them. At the same time, we, the scholars of (European) law and integration, have too often remained oblivious to these cross-cutting issues and problems. We have made European law a far too often inward-looking, and self-satisfied discipline, developed mostly within the boundaries of its multiple sub-fields, as delimited by the Treaty, by the conventions that delimit the institutional and the material, and by ever growing disciplinary specialisation.

Open

More than nailing down a manifesto, this editorial wants to extend an invitation. We are eager to experiment with new formats, publish new types of content, and forge new bonds with our readers. The ‘open’ in our much disparaged name is meant to convey a number of things that are important to us.

First, and most obviously, ELO is open access—which, as we have found, is a surprisingly ambiguous term. It might be worth stating clearly that ELO is free both to readers and to authors: this is not a case of replacing ‘pay to read’ with ‘pay to write.’ Many authors will be covered by the expanding network of agreements and arrangements that CUP is spinning with institutions and agencies all over, but some will not. For these cases, a blanket waiver is in place. We, the editors, know nor care to know which category authors fall into. Now, obviously, opinions will vary on the wider issues involved in the economics of open access academic publishing models, but for present purposes the cardinal point for us is simply that financial considerations will not influence decisions on whom and what gets published in ELO.

ELO is intellectually open to a variety of legal traditions and academic disciplines, and attentive to the influence that cultural, political and economic contexts exert over both the framing of problems and solutions. It is methodologically open, because the understanding, deconstruction and construction of EU law – a creature of certain time, place and a broader political, social, and economic context – begs a broad range of theoretical, doctrinal and interdisciplinary methods and approaches. It is teleologically open: it neither embraces the idea that EU law is but an instrument towards the apolitical finality of ‘integration’, nor other (gross) simplifications of the European reality, such as the binary choice between Europeanisation and a return to the national. It is geographically open: it aims at breaking the artificial (and certainly outdated) divide between scholars dwelling on European law and scholars working on national law, to enrich EU law by bringing it into conversation with different national legal and scholarly traditions, but also widen its reach. It is also open to new voices in the scholarship on European law and integration, to their way of thinking about EU law from the stand point of their diverse backgrounds. If the community of European law scholars – broadly understood – truly intends to both address the issues of the past as well as the challenges of the future, it must renew itself.

Its openness, we contend, is important for what the journal aims to achieve and to the type of scholarship it is committed to. ELO will map, systematise, criticise and support the development of positive law, especially in the blind spots of mainstream European law. It will also analyse and confront the darker legacies of European law, as European integration was as much a project of peace and prosperity as a product of its history, enmeshed in Europe’s empires and colonialism, in the definition of borders that transcended the continent, and of racial and gender exclusions. Re-founding EU law requires the combination of doctrinal and interdisciplinary research, that constructs, interrogates and improves legal categories as it opens new perspectives on the role and implications of EU law. This is the task that the journal takes on.

Formats, by way of ‘in this issue… ’

European legal scholarship advances in chunks of 8 to 10 thousand words. This is the word limit of all major law reviews in the field, for historically clear and understandable reasons: paper is