Page:ELO 1(1), 209–215. EU and law in context the context.pdf/1

European Law Open (2022), 1, 209–215 doi:10.1017/elo.2022.10 BOOKS AND CLASSICS

Carol Harlow


 * Abstract

1. A new approach

In 1987, 15 years after the United Kingdom (UK) signed up to the European Community (EC) – realistically perhaps to the Common Market – Francis Snyder published an article asking for ‘new directions’ in the teaching and study of EC law. His complaint was the dryness of EC law studies. EC law had ‘often been regarded (and taught) simply as a highly technical set of rules, a dense doctrinal thicket into which only the ignorant or the foolish would “jump in and scratch out their eyes”, still less try to understand in terms of social theories of law.’ It had in this respect been to some extent ‘incorporated into the textbook tradition of English law’, a development Snyder attributed to the fact that EC law had been taught in the UK by ‘a handful of specialists’, most of whom had begun their careers as legal secretaries at the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The outcome had been a markedly uncritical stance and a narrow focus in teaching and legal literature on the Court and its case law.

Snyder was writing about the UK, where he was teaching at Warwick Law School, founded in 1967 with a law in context agenda and an evolving record for its contextual approach to legal education. Legal positivism and a narrow focus on doctrine and the jurisprudence of the superior courts are not confined to the UK, however, and very similar criticism could have been levelled at EC legal studies more widely. In the formative period of EC law, the infant institutions were left much to their own devices without the guidance of a constitution in fleshing out their roles. EC lawyers were largely receptive of integrationist doctrine and concerned at the same time to shelter the ECJ from accusations of playing politics in embedding integrationism in the case law. Indeed,