Making a key contribution to the contemporary debate about methods in European legal research, this comprehensive book looks behind different methodologies to explore the institutional, disciplinary, and political conflicts that shape questions of 'method' or 'approach' in European legal scholarship. Offering a new perspective on the underlying politics of method, it identifies four core dimensions of methodological struggle in legal research - the politics of questions, the politics of answers, the politics of legal audiences, and the politics of the concept of law. Chapters explore how methodological choices impact the questions legal scholars ask, the answers they seek, the audiences for and to whom they speak, and ultimately their understanding of the legal and the social world. Leading contributors uncover the framing discourses, institutional inertias, and political pressures that shape research questions, while assessing the effects of importing social science methods into legal research, and how audiences of legal research and education shape our understanding of law. Concluding with a reflection on the continued, if qualified, relevance of formal doctrinal methods for European legal research, this thought-provoking book will be a key resource for students and scholars of law and politics, research methods and European law.

Making a key contribution to the contemporary debate about methods in European legal research, this comprehensive book looks behind different methodologies to explore the institutional, disciplinary, and political conflicts that shape questions of ‘method’ or ‘approach’ in European legal scholarship. Offering a new perspective on the underlying politics of method, it identifies four core dimensions of methodological struggle in legal research – the politics of questions, the politics of answers, the politics of legal audiences, and the politics of the concept of law.

Offering a wealth of thought-provoking insights, this topical Research Handbook analyses the interplay between the law and politics of the EU and examines the role of law and legal actors in European integration.

Compares national concepts of social justice with the developing European concept of access justice.

Despite western Europe's traditional disdain for the United States' "adversarial legalism," the European Union is shifting toward a very similar approach to the law, according to Daniel Kelemen. Coining the term "eurolegalism" to describe the hybrid that is now developing in Europe, he shows how the political and organizational realities of the EU make this shift inevitable. The model of regulatory law that had long predominated in western Europe was more informal and cooperative than its American counterpart. It relied less on lawyers, courts, and private enforcement, and more on opaque networks of bureaucrats and other interests that developed and implemented regulatory policies in concert. European regulators chose flexible, informal means of achieving their objectives, and counted on the courts to challenge their decisions only rarely. Regulation through litigation-central to the U.S. model-was largely absent in Europe. But that changed with the advent of the European Union. Kelemen argues that the EU's fragmented institutional structure and the priority it has put on market integration have generated political incentives and functional pressures that have moved EU policymakers to enact detailed, transparent, judicially enforceable rules-often framed as "rights"-and back them with public enforcement litigation as well as enhanced opportunities for private litigation by individuals, interest groups, and firms.

The inside story of the daily work of lawyers in the EU institutions and their impact on EU policy making.