Page:ELO 1(1), 209–215. EU and law in context the context.pdf/2

210   Carol Harlow Martin Shapiro, an American observer with law and/political science qualifications, famously described EC constitutional law as ‘constitutional law without the politics’. Shapiro attacked the presentation of the EC as:

"a juristic idea; the written constitution as a sacred text; the professional commentary as a legal truth; the case law as the inevitable working out of the correct implications of the constitutional text; and the constitutional court as the disembodied voice of right reason and constitutional teleology."

This contribution tells us much about the source of ideas about need for change of direction in EC legal studies.

Shapiro asked questions too about the legal community in which these attitudes had developed. An empirical survey made some years later showed just how homogeneous the legal coterie was. The majority of those writing on law in major EC journals had close links with one or more of the EC institutions. Their conception of law and what law can and should do was widely shared. They were mainly integrationist in persuasion, identifying with the project of European integration both intellectually and socially, with a tendency ‘to rally as one around the Court in its patient creation of a genuine supreme legal order’.

Snyder was not a member of this coterie and his legal predilections were internationalist, pluralist and interdisciplinary. Here his credentials were formidable. After graduating from Yale, he had completed postgraduate studies in law at Harvard and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris but also had substantial publications on African politics to his credit. At the time of writing, Snyder was teaching at Warwick Law School, noted, as already indicated, for its commitment to law in context.

Snyder’s take on EC law was as ‘an intricate web of politics, economics and law’ that called out to be studied and understood by ‘a political economy of law or an interdisciplinary, contextual or critical approach.’ Without jettisoning the established tradition of ‘highly sophisticated scholarship concerning legal doctrine’ in fields such as institutions, procedures and competition law, Snyder demanded innovation in the teaching and study of EC law. In the study of institutions and processes, for example, scholars should branch out to study other institutions than courts and utilise the theoretical insights and findings of other social sciences. They should bear in mind that economic law extends outside competition and look outside the EC to the world economy, evaluating the place and importance of the EC in the global economy.

Snyder’s own work was illustrative. He had been working for some time on the Common Agricultural Policy, on which much of the argument in ‘New Directions’ is based, and which later formed the basis for a study of EC lawmaking intended for anthropologists and first published in a book about the anthropology of law. In this study, Snyder advanced the thesis that conceptions of ‘interests’ and ‘interest representation’ underlie any study of law in society, serving as analytical tools for understanding legal ideas, institutions, and processes, and helping to define