Page:ELO 1(1), 209–215. EU and law in context the context.pdf/6

214   Carol Harlow international relations, public policy analysis, theories of institutional behaviour, etc – to the tools of legal scholarship, defined in ‘New Directions’ terms to include socio-legal studies, postmodernist theory, critical legal studies, law in context, and so on.

New Legal Dynamics epitomised the Law in Context approach. It comprised a mix of theoretical essays with single sector studies by specialist legal authors of EU policy areas, ranging from the familiar Single Market and workers’ rights to the less-well-known topics of EU citizenship, administrative law and public interest litigation and external affairs (relationship with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – GATT). It was, however, only marginally interdisciplinary. Problems of interdisciplinary cooperation were highlighted some years later when Kenneth Armstrong suggested that even if political science had discovered the ECJ, it had not discovered law. He attempted to remedy the deficiency in an article that set out ‘to integrate the legal dimension into the core of the interdisciplinary network which characterizes European studies’, published in a Special Issue of the prestigious Journal of Common Market Studies. Armstrong’s contribution was a substantial exploration of different images of law and courts in political science and legal literature with a view to conceptualising the role of law in European integration. His focus was on the ECJ but, rather than providing a conventional analysis of the case law, the article is a serious attempt to link law and its institutions with the political science concepts of intergovernmentalism, neofunctionalism and constitutionalism, while also exploring the relationship between law and governance.

Looking back to antecedents, Jo Shaw set out in her ‘Introduction’ to draw together the main elements of the new approach around the theme of integration. Snyder’s contextual work received a mention, while the empirical studies by Burley/Slaughter and Mattli stressed the growing influence of American socio-legal work. Special mention was made of the transformational constitutional writing of Joseph Weiler. Weiler would remark of the law in context approach that it was the new orthodoxy – ‘of course de rigueur’ – but described his own general approach as ‘hardly one of law in context; it exemplifies a “pure” theory of law, with the rider that law is much wider than doctrine and norms and that the very dichotomy of law and politics is questionable’. It is nevertheless appropriate to claim Weiler as a law in context writer and certainly as a critical legal scholar. His polymathic scholarship and rounded scholarly writings dip deeply into the politics and ‘geology’ of EU law and its institutions. Weiler is, moreover a founding editor of the European Journal of International Law, a journal with a specifically European focus, an important concern of which was to explore the ‘central role which the Community is assuming in the GATT or the North–South dialogue, through instruments such as the successive Lomé conventions, and in the East–West dialogue, exemplified by the role it has taken in coordinating aid to Eastern Europe’. Suggestively, the very first article, entitled ‘The Politics of Law’, was contributed by Martti Koskenniemi, a distinguished international lawyer and diplomat well known for his critical approach to international law. These are hardly the symbols of classical legal formalism.