Carol Harlow

“ Kairys himself fired well-aimed shots at ‘the language of legal discourse and mystique of legal reasoning’, arguing that they served a primarily ideological purpose, with outcomes determined by social and political judgment; ‘law is simply politics by other means’. [23] Essays on a wide variety of legal subjects were contributed by legal practitioners and academics but using methods drawn from sociology, economics, political science and law. This was something like the approach that Snyder was hoping for. ”

“ By the time Snyder wrote, the two closely linked movements of critical legal studies and social theories of law were strongly represented in American legal literature. In the USA, where the critical legal studies movement started, David Trubek opened a study of social theory in 1972 by boldly declaring that the implicit, a priori conclusions about the role of law were no longer valid; we must turn instead to ‘systematic efforts to understand the relationships among the legal, social, economic, and political orders’. ”

“ In the study of institutions and processes, for example, scholars should branch out to study other institutions than courts and utilise the theoretical insights and findings of other social sciences. They should bear in mind that economic law extends outside competition and look outside the EC to the world economy, evaluating the place and importance of the EC in the global economy. ”

“ Scholars would add the tools of interdisciplinary scholarship: comparative politics, 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. ”

“ In the result, the mainstream of British writing by lawyers about the constitution analyses constitutional principles and structures largely to the exclusion of any consideration of the activities in which the organs of government are engaged or the purposes with which they pursue them. ”

“ In some ways, the ELJ might be seen as Francis Snyder’s chief and longest-lasting contribution to European legal scholarship, but he has made many others. He was the first to urge European legal scholars to abandon the safe areas of competition and labour law and to provide sectorspecific studies of less accessible areas. He has encouraged cultural pluralism and with the International Workshops for Young Scholars (WISH) , provided a platform for young scholars to publish on innovative topics such as food security, law and religion, and many others. ”

“ The majority of those writing on law in major EC journals had close links with one or more of the EC institutions. Their conception of law and what law can and should do was widely shared. They were mainly integrationist in persuasion, identifying with the project of European integration both intellectually and socially, with a tendency ‘to rally as one around the Court in its patient creation of a genuine supreme legal order’. [6]
Snyder was not a member of this coterie and his legal predilections were internationalist, pluralist and interdisciplinary. ”

“ The first (in common with social theory) treated doctrine as the expression of a particular vision of society and emphasised the contradictory and manipulable character of doctrinal argument. The second took as its point of departure the idea that law and legal doctrine ‘reflect, confirm, and reshape the social divisions and hierarchies inherent in a type or stage of social organization such as “capitalism”’. [20] These closely resemble the points made by Snyder in respect of EC legal studies. ”

“ 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, [34] 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’. ”