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Rh aimed ‘to follow this tradition of transcending disciplinary boundaries by taking as its focus the subject area of law in society’. Nonetheless, Tony Prosser, in an important article in a later issue, still found it appropriate to express dissatisfaction with the traditional common law style of public law writing, ‘composed exhaustively of rules which pass formal tests of legal validity’. This positivist conception of law, Prosser noted, was closely linked to liberal-capitalism – a point made by Snyder in connection with EC law. Like Snyder, Prosser rejected the ‘neutral principles’ approach as ‘no longer an appropriate means of conceptualising Western societies’. He once more argued for a new, critical theory of public law, which ‘should not only describe and explain the operation of state institutions but should also provide the means for an effective critique of them and point the way for their future development’.

In other areas of law, this development was well under way. A year later, in a survey of the field, Harris listed much legal scholarship in sociology, social policy and social administration, referring once again to dissatisfaction amongst younger scholars with the traditional style of legal studies. He thought the rise of interest in the study of law in society and sociology of law, though less in economics, political science and other related disciplines, to be consequential. The Law in Context series of legal books was started in 1970 as a vehicle for works that treated law and legal phenomena ‘critically in their cultural, social, political, technological, environmental and economics contexts’ and broadly, using materials and methods from ‘any other discipline that helps to explain the operation in practice of the particular legal field or legal phenomena under investigation’. This was precisely the approach that Snyder had practised and advocated, and in 1990 he published New Directions in European Community Law, a republication including his earlier work on the Common Agricultural Policy, as the first Law in Context study of EC law. In the same series, Ian Ward published A Critical Introduction to European Law in 1996, designed as an examination of EU law in its economic, philosophical, historical and political contexts.

4. The EC: a new look

Amongst Anglophone EC scholars, the plea for ‘new directions’ met an enthusiastic response. The editors of New Legal Dynamics, a set of ‘new look’ essays published in 1996, presented it as ‘part of a trend towards broadening the focus of legal scholarship in the field of European integration’ and marking ‘the first tentative steps towards the articulation of a new voice for European legal studies’. Scholars would add the tools of interdisciplinary scholarship: comparative politics,