This comprehensive Handbook provides a critical and analytical guide to the application of interdisciplinary research methods in EU law and explores the advancement of the EU legal landscape from an interdisciplinary research perspective. Venturing beyond doctrinal legal scholarship, it reflects on the cognitive synergies between EU law and other disciplines, and advances the debate on contemporary trends in EU law research. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

Law research students often begin their PhDs without having an awareness of methodology, or the opportunity to think about the practice of research and its theoretical implications. Law Schools are, however, increasingly alive to the need to provide training in research methods to their students. They are also alive to the need to develop the research capacities of their early career scholars, not least for the Research Excellence Framework exercise. This book offers a structured approach to doing so, focusing on issues of methodology - ie, the theoretical elements of research - within the context of EU and international law. The book can be used alone, or could form the basis of a seminar-based course, or a departmental, or even regional, discussion group. At the core of the book are the materials produced for a series of workshops, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council's Collaborative Doctoral Training Fund, on Legal Research Methodologies in EU and international law. These materials consist of a document with readings on main and less mainstream methodological approaches (what we call modern and critical approaches, and the 'law and' approaches) to research in EU and international law, and a series of questions and exercises which encourage reflection on those readings, both in their own terms, and in terms of different research agendas. There are also supporting materials, giving guidance on practical matters, such as how to give a paper or be a discussant at an academic conference. The basic aim of the book is to help scholars in EU and international law reflect on their research: where does it fit within the discipline, what kinds of research questions they think interesting, how do they pursue them, what theoretical perspective best supports their way of thinking their project, and so on. The book is aimed both at PhD students and early career scholars in EU and international law, and also at more established scholars who are interested in reflecting on the development of their discipline, as well as supervising research projects.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This insightful and timely book introduces an explanatory theory for surveying global and international politics. Describing the nature and effects of democracy beyond the state, Hans Agné explores peace and conflict, migration politics, resource distribution, regime effectiveness, foreign policy and posthuman politics through the lens of democratism to both supplement and challenge established research paradigms.

This book gives an overview of the most relevant disciplines for interdisciplinary research on law. What are the characteristics of these disciplines one really needs to understand in order to do research that combines law with them? The book consists of three parts. The first part addresses general methodological questions about legal scholarship and interdisciplinary research. The second part consists of chapters exploring the relationship between law and other disciplines. The disciplines are classified in broadly three categories: empirical social science, humanities, and language-oriented disciplines. The third part contains examples of interdisciplinary research in practice: how is it done, what kinds of problems arise when doing such research, and what insights into law does it provide?

The book explores cutting-edge interdisciplinary research strategies for the study of the Court of Justice of the European Union.

This collection sets a new agenda for conducting research on the EU and learns from past mistakes. In doing so it provides a state-of-the-art examination of social science research designs in EU studies while providing innovative guidelines for the advancement of more inclusive and empirically sensitive research designs in EU studies

National Judges as EU law Judges: The Polish Civil Law System by Urszula Jaremba aims at filling a research gap in one of the key areas of EU law concerning its enforcement at the national level and the phenomenon of judicial behaviour. More precisely, it examines the way civil judges in Poland function as EU law judges, and the practical problems they encounter while striving to actualise this constitutive role. However, the book goes beyond the formal law scenario, and investigates how Polish civil judges establish their own understanding of EU law and the new requirements it has imposed upon them. To this end, the study employs an empirical − that is to say quantitative and qualitative − methodology and theory to result in a socio-legal study that combines legal and empirical insights into the way national judges function in the context of EU law.