EU Law Stories

This book retells the multiple stories behind the rulings of the European Court, revealing their context, their history and the legal and non-legal strategies of their actors.

The book is intended for students, scholars and practitioners of EU law, as well as those interested in legal history, and comparative and international law. The book incorporates the work of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to re-imagine some of the most significant decisions of the European Court.Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union, this book offers 'thick' descriptions, contextual histories and critical narratives engaging with leading or minor personalities involved behind the scenes of each case. The contributions depart from the notion that EU law and its history should be narrated in a linear and incremental way to show instead that law evolves in a contingent and not determinate manner. The book shows that the effects of judge-made law remain relatively indeterminate and each case can be retold through different contextual narratives, and shows the commitment of the European legal elites to the experience of legal reasoning. The idea to cluster the stories around prominent cases is not to be fully comprehensive, but to re-focus the scholarship and teaching of EU law by moving beyond the black letter and unravel the lawyering techniques to achieve policy results.